Experimental study to obtain the viscosity of CuO-loaded nanofluid: effects of nanoparticles’ mass fraction, temperature and basefluid’s types to develop a correlation

Abstract

In this study, the impacts of temperature, nanoparticles mass fraction, and basefluid types were investigated on the dynamic viscosity of CuO-loaded nanofluids. The nanoparticles were dispersed in deionized water, ethanol, and ethylene glycol as basefluids separately and the measurements were performed on samples with nanoparticles loads ranging from 0.005 to 5 wt%, and the temperature range of 25 to 70 °C. TEM analysis were performed on dried nanoparticles and the results showed the average mean diameter of CuO nanoparticles ranged from 10 to 50 nm. The results of DLS analysis confirmed the results of nanoparticles size obtained by TEM analysis in mentioned basefluids and Zeta-Potential tests exhibited the high stability of the nanoparticles in the basefluids environment. The results indicate that by adding tiny amount of CuO nanoparticles to basefluids, relative viscosity of nanofluid increases. By the increase in nanoparticles load higher than 0.1 wt% the effect of both nanoparticles mass fraction and temperature would be more tangible, while for nanoparticles mass fraction lower than 0.1 wt% no significant change in viscosity was observed. In addition, the results declare that viscosity of nanofluid remains constant at various applied shear rates indicating Newtonian behavior of nanofluid at various nanoparticles load and temperature. According to experimental data, it is also evident that with the increase in temperature, the value of relative dynamic viscosity decreases significantly. Also it is concluded that for CuO/ethanol nanofluid, more interfacial interaction is resulted that causes higher relative dynamic viscosity while for CuO/water lower interfacial interaction between nanoparticles surface and water molecules are resulted which leads to the lower values for this parameter. The results of this study implied that with increase the temperature from 25 to 70 °C at the condition where nanoparticles mass fraction was chosen to be 5 wt%, the value of dynamic viscosity of CuO/ethanol, CuO/deionized water, CuO/ethylene glycol declined 69%, 66%, and 65% respectively. Finally, a correlation was proposed for the relative dynamic viscosity of nanofluid based on the CuO nanoparticles mass fraction and temperature of the basefluid and nanoparticles.