Natural convection heat transfer in vertical triangular subchannel in Zirconia-water nanofluid

Abstract

Natural convection heat transfer in vertical triangular sub-channel has important role in cooling mechanism of the APWR and the PHWR nuclear reactors. Unfortunately, natural convection correlation equations for such geometry are scarcely available. Recent studies showed that ZrO2-water nanofluid has a good prospect to be used in the nuclear reactor technology due to its low neutron absorption cross section. Although several papers have reported transport properties of ZrO2-water nanofluids, practically there is no correlation equation for predicting natural convection heat transfer in a vertical triangular sub-channel in ZrO2-water nanofluid. Therefore, a study for finding such heat transfer correlation equation has been done by utilizing Computational Fluid Dynamics software and reported in this paper. In the study, natural convection heat transfer in a vertical triangular sub-channel has been simulated at several values of heat transfer flux within 9.1 to 30.9 kW/m2 range and ZrO2 concentrations of 0 (pure water), 0.27, and 3 volume-% of ZrO2. The study shows that the ZrO2 concentration has no significant influence to the natural convection heat transfer at those concentration levels. The obtained theoretical heat transfer correlation equations were verified through experiment, and they showed very similar results. The correlation equations are reported in this paper.