Parametric Analysis of Effective Thermal Conductivity Models for Nanofluids

There is a lack of reported research on comprehensive hybrid models for the effective thermal conductivity of nanofluids that takes into consideration all major mechanisms and parameters. The major mechanisms are the nanolayer, Brownian motion and clustering. The recognized important parameters can be the volume fraction of the nanoparticles, temperature, particle size, thermal conductivity of the nanolayer, thermal conductivity of the base fluid, PH of the nanofluid, and the thermal conductivity of the nanoparticle. Therefore, in this work, a parametric analysis of effective thermal conductivity models for nanofluids was done. The impact of the measurable parameters, like volume fraction of the nanoparticles, temperature and the particle size for the more sited models, were analyzed by using alumina-water nanofluid. The result of this investigation identifies the lack of a hybrid equation for the effective thermal conductivity of nanofluids and, consequently, more research is required in this field.