Abstract
Nanofluids are regarded as an effective cooling medium with tremendous potential in heat transfer enhancement. In reality, nanofluids in microchannels are at the mercy of uncertainties unavoidably due to manufacturing error, dispersion of physical properties, and inconstant operating conditions. To obtain a deeper understanding of forced convection of nanofluids in microchannels, uncertainties are suggested to be considered. This paper studies numerically the uncertain forced convection of Al2O3-water nanofluid laminar flow in a grooved microchannel. Uncertainties in material properties and geometrical parameter are considered. The uncertainties are represented by interval variables. By employing Chebyshev polynomial approximation, interval method (IM) is presented to estimate the uncertain thermal performance and flow behavior of the forced convection problem. The validation of the accuracy and effectiveness of IM are demonstrated by a comparison with the scanning method (SM). The variation of temperature, velocity, and Nusselt number are obtained under different interval uncertainties. The results show that the uncertainties have remarkable influences on the simulated thermal performance and flow behavior.
Highlights
In the traditional numerical investigations on the forced convection problem, the parameters that affect the thermal performance and flow behavior are treated as deterministic values
A good agreement can be observed in Table 4, which proves the accuracy of interval method (IM)
There are 100 samples used in the prediction procedure by employing scanning method (SM) while only five samples are used by using IM, which proves the effectiveness of IM
Summary
In the traditional numerical investigations on the forced convection problem, the parameters that affect the thermal performance and flow behavior are treated as deterministic values. Nada et al [5] performed numerical investigations on the natural convection heat transfer of various water-based nanofluids in horizontal annular tubes, and TiO2 , Ag, Cu, and Al2 O3 nanoparticles were considered. Wang et al [17] proposed two variations of IM to estimate the bounds of temperature in heat investigated the uncertain response of a convection diffusion problem by employing IM based on the convection-diffusion problems, and different types of uncertainties were taken into account. Wang et al [17] proposed two variations of IM to estimate in their latter work [25], they regarded the fuzzy parameters as interval variables and analyzed the the bounds of temperature in heat convection-diffusion problems, and different types of uncertainties fuzzy uncertainty propagation in a heat conduction problem.
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