Numerical Investigation of Heat Transfer Characteristics of Different Nanoparticles Using Modified Eulerian-Eulerian Model

Nanofluids are widely adopted nowadays to enhance the heat transfer characteristics in the solar applications because of their excellent thermophysical properties. In this paper, a modified Eulerian-Eulerian model recently developed based on experiments was validated numerically to account for the deviations from the experimental data. The modified Eulerian-Eulerian model is compared with the single-phase model, Eulerian-Eulerian models for TiO2-water at different operating conditions and deviation from the experimental data for each of the model was documented. However, the modified Eulerian-Eulerian model gave much closer results when compared to the experimental data. For the further extension of work, the modified Eulerian-Eulerian model was applied to different nanofluids in order to investigate their heat transfer characteristics. Three different nanoparticles were investigated namely Cu, MgO, and Ag and their heat transfer characteristics is calculated based on the modified Eulerian-Eulerian model as well as the single-phase model for the comparison. For lower values of Reynolds numbers, the average heat transfer coefficient was almost identical for both models with small percentage of error but for higher Reynolds numbers, the deviation got larger. Therefore, single-phase model is not appropriate for higher Reynolds numbers and modified Eulerian-Eulerian model should be used to accurately predict the heat transfer characteristics of the nanofluids at higher Reynolds numbers. From the analysis it is found that the Ag-water nanofluid have the highest heat transfer characteristics among others and can be employed in the solar heat exchangers to enhance the heat transfer characteristics and to further improve the efficiency.