Effect of cross-sectional area and number of Fe nanoparticles on the thermal behavior of pool boiling heat transfer of the water-based nanofluid: A molecular dynamics study

Abstract

Today, pool boiling heat transfer (HT) plays an important role in many industries and engineering systems. This study investigates the effect of factors such as cross-sectional area and the number of Fe nanoparticles (NPs) on pool boiling HT of water/Fe nanofluid (NF) in a microchannel. This research is performed using the molecular dynamics (MD) simulation. For this research, quantities such as maximum density, velocity, temperature, heat flux (HF) and phase change time are investigated. The results indicate that increasing the number of NPs reduces the phase-change duration. Adding the NPs to the base fluid improves the pool boiling HT. By reducing the cross-sectional area of the microchannel from 0.25 μm 2 to 0.09 μm 2 , the HF increases, and as a result, the pool boiling HT occurs at a higher rate. So, reducing the cross-sectional area decreases the phase-change duration from 0.33 to 0.30 ns. NPs due to the increase in HT surface, increase in effective thermal conductivity and uniformity of temperature changes in the base fluid leads to a very large increase in the heat transfer coefficient (HTC). Finally, it is expected that using these simulations, optimization of water/Fe NF behavior to enhance the pool boiling HT in micro-scale (microchannels) and nanoscale applications is done.