Thermal performance of copper-distilled water nanofluid in a wavy channel

Abstract

This paper carried out an experimental study to synthesize and characterize copper water based nanofluid. To do so nanoparticles were fabricated by using one-step pulsed Nd: YAG laser ablation method under ambient conditions. Copper substrate was ablated for the duration of 25 min to ensure enough volume fraction of nanoparticles inside the host fluid. Energy dispersive spectroscopy (EDS) and scanning electron microscopy were done. The morphology of the nanoparticles seems to be homogeneous. The size distribution analysis resulted in the average size of 100 nm. Also, UV–Vis spectroscopy analysis was done for four months to investigate the stability of the synthesized nanofluid. It is observed that the nanofluid is not enough stable for more than one month. On the other hand, numerical simulations were done employing Ansys Fluent software to study thermal behavior of copper nanofluid in a corrugated channel. It is observed that higher volume fraction of nanoparticles leads to the higher heat transfer rate. Also, in this study, hydrophobic wavy wall with a constant temperature was considered as a hydrodynamical approach to enhance the heat transfer rate. It is concluded that hydrophobicity contributes to the increment of Nusselt number up to 45 percent in laminar flow. Meanwhile, Discrete phase method, which attribute to the Eulerian Lagrangian approach, was simulated. Outcomes indicated that DPM method can be trusted by less than 2% error in laminar flow.