Micro-mechanism Analysis of Heat conductivity Enhancement of Argon-based Copper Nanofluids

Abstract

Enhancing heat transfer is the consistent goal in current industrial production. Nanofluids have greater advantages than traditional fluids.In this in the passage, MDS was used to research the mechanism of improving the heat conductivity of Cu-Ar nanofluids compared with conventional fluids. The effects of nanoparticles with various volume fractions (1% - 3%) and different sizes (r = 1.03 nm, 1.26 nm, 1.50 nm) on the heat conductivity of nanofluids were mainly discussed. The results showed that the insertion of Cu nanoparticles increased the heat conductivity of the base fluid in studied range. The heat conductivity of the nanofluid was proportional to the volume fraction of the nanoparticles, and the maximum increase was 29.1%. Inversely ratio to the particle size, the maximum increase was 15.3%. The microscopic mechanism of the systems was statistically analyzed by the radial distribution function. It was found that the addition of nanoparticles caused the change in the atomic arrangement of the nanofluids, which made the nanofluids exhibit a microstructure similar to that of the solid. This is why the heat transfer efficiency of nanofluids is higher.