Mathematics and Computer Science, Volume 1

29Application of Nanofluids in Heat Exchanger and its Computational Fluid Dynamics

M. Appadurai¹, E. Fantin Irudaya Raj²* and M. Chithambara Thanu¹

¹Department of Mechanical Engineering, Dr. Sivanthi Aditanar College of Engineering, Tamil Nadu, India

²Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Dr. Sivanthi Aditanar College of Engineering, Tamil Nadu, India

Abstract

Nanofluids are colloids containing a base fluid (mostly water) and nanoparticles (polymers, metals, metal oxides, carbon nanotubes). It can be viewed as the future heat transfer fluid in a diverse array of plate heat exchangers. Due to the presence of dispersed nanoparticles with a high thermal conductivity, they are projected to perform better thermally than normal fluids. Evaluating the improvement of heat transfer resulting by the use of nanofluids has lately become a focus of attention for a large number of researchers. For the evaluation of heat transfer enhancement using nanofluids can be studied by using Computational fluid dynamics (CFD). It is a subset of fluid dynamics that uses data structures and numerical analysis to investigate and deal with problems involving fluid flows. It allows the implementation of fluid motion equations to a wide variety of complex situations, yielding quantitative as well as qualitative predictions. Computers are used to simulate the free-stream flow of a fluid and its interaction with boundary constraint surfaces. The present chapter discusses about basics of CFD ...