Analysis of flow and heat transfer characteristics of nanofluids surface tension driven convection in a rectangular cavity

Abstract

The addition of nanoparticles into base fluid not only can improve thermophysical properties, but also can change its surface tension, so the flow and heat transfer of nanofluids surface tension driven convection can be significantly influenced by nanoparticles. The present paper reports the analysis of flow and heat transfer of nanofluids surface tension driven convection in a rectangular cavity, in which two types of nanofluids of distilled water–Al2O3 and PGW(60% propylene glycol and 40% water by mass)-ZnO are considered, and the two-phase Mixture model is used to simulate the nanofluids flow. The computational results show that, for nanofluid distilled water–Al2O3, the convective intensity and heat transfer performance indicates a nonmonotonic change with nanoparticles volume fraction increasing, however, for nanofluid PGW–ZnO the convective intensity and heat transfer performance decreases monotonously. Moreover, the flow characteristics and entropy generation under different nanoparticles volume fractions are analyzed in detail.