Heat transfer optimization of two phase modeling of nanofluid in a sinusoidal wavy channel using Artificial Bee Colony technique

Abstract

The present study represents the heat transfer optimization of two-dimensional incompressible laminar flow of Al2O3-water nanofluids in a duct with uniform temperature corrugated walls. A two phase model is applied to investigate different governing parameters, namely: Reynolds number (100 ≤ Re ≤ 1000), nonofluids volume fraction (0% ≤ ϕ ≤ 5%) and amplitude of the wavy wall (0 ≤ α ≤ 0.04 m). For optimization process, a recent spot-lighted method, called Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithm, is applied, and the results are shown to be in a good accuracy in comparison with another well-known heuristic method, i.e. particle swarm optimization (PSO). The results indicate that the effect of utilizing nanoparticles and increasing Reynolds number is more intensified on growing the average Nusselt number than variations of the amplitude of the wavy wall. To prevent the worst possible heat transfer, the specific amplitude which leads to a minimum average Nusselt number is detected. The effect of using nanoparticles on thermal-hydraulic performance factor (j/f) is presented which considers both heat transfer and hydrodynamics aspects. The results showed that volume fraction has a direct and the wavy wall's amplitude has a converse effect on the thermal-hydraulic performance factor. Furthermore, an optimum value for Reynolds number is found to maximize the thermal-hydraulic performance factor.