Heat and Mass Transfer in External Boundary Layer Flows Using Nanofluids

Abstract

The application of additives to base liquids in the sole aim to increase the heat transfer coefficient is considered as an interesting mean for thermal systems. Nanofluids, prepared by dispersing nanometer-sized solid particles in a base-fluid (liquid), have been extensively studied for more than a decade due to the observation of an interesting increase in thermal conductivity compared to that of the base-fluid (Xuan & Roetzel, 2000; Xuan & Li, 2000). Initially, research works devoted to nanofluids were mainly focussed on the way to increase the thermal conductivity by modifying the particle volume fraction, the particle size/shape or the base-fluid (Murshed et al., 2005; Wang & Mujumdar, 2007). Using nanofluids strongly influences the boundary layer thickness by modifying the viscosity of the resulting mixture leading to variations in the mass transfer in the vicinity of walls in external boundary-layer flows. Then, research works on convective heat transfer, with nanofluids as working fluids, have been carried out in order to test their potential for applications related to industrial heat exchangers. It is now well known that in forced convection (Maiga et al. 2005) as well as in mixed convection, using nanofluids can produce a considerable enhancement of the heat transfer coefficient that increases with the increasing nanoparticle volume fraction. As concerns natural convection, the fewer results published in the literature (Khanafer et al. 2003; Polidori et al., 2007; Popa et al., 2010; Putra et al. 2003) lead to more mixed conclusions. For example, recent works by Polidori et al. (2007) and Popa et al. (2010) have led to numerical results showing that the use of Newtonian nanofluids for the purpose of heat transfer enhancement in natural convection was not obvious, as such enhancement is dependent not only on nanofluids effective thermal conductivities but on their viscosities as well. This means that an exact determination of the heat transfer parameters is not warranted as long as the question of the choice of an adequate and realistic effective viscosity model is not resolved (Polidori et al. 2007, Keblinski et al. 2008). It is worth mentioning that this viewpoint is also confirmed in a recent work (Ben Mansour et al., 2007) for forced convection, in which the authors indicated that the assessment of the heat transfer enhancement potential of a nanofluid is difficult and closely dependent on the way the nanofluid properties are modelled. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to present theoretical models fully describing the natural and forced convective heat and mass transfer regimes for nanofluids flowing in semi-infinite geometries, i.e. external boundary layer flows along