TY - JOUR
T1 - The potential impact of nanofluid enhancements on the performance of heat exchangers
AU - Liu, Liping
AU - Kim, Eung Soo
AU - Park, Young Gil
AU - Jacobi, Anthony M.
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was financially supported by the Air Conditioning and Refrigeration Center (ACRC) at the University of Illinois (Urbana–Champaign).
PY - 2012/1
Y1 - 2012/1
N2 - The potential benefit of using nanofluids in heat-exchanger applications is explored using an -NTU analysis. As expected, the enhancement in number of transfer units (NTU) is largest when the convection resistance associated with the flow to be enhanced is a large contributor to the overall thermal resistance of the baseline heat exchanger. Likewise, as expected, nanofluid enhancement has a larger impact for poorly performing baseline heat exchangers. For a single-pass cross-flow configuration, with both fluids unmixed, the ratio of heat capacity rates is unimportant in nanofluid enhancement. Among all flow arrangements investigated, the concentric-tube, counterflow arrangement shows highest improvement in heat duty for a prescribed convective heat-transfer enhancement. The enhancement in convection also suggests a significant saving of heat-transfer area/material, and the saving also increases with the resistance ratio of the enhanced stream to the overall thermal resistance. The impact of specific heat reduction due to the existence of nanoparticles in the stream is also investigated.
AB - The potential benefit of using nanofluids in heat-exchanger applications is explored using an -NTU analysis. As expected, the enhancement in number of transfer units (NTU) is largest when the convection resistance associated with the flow to be enhanced is a large contributor to the overall thermal resistance of the baseline heat exchanger. Likewise, as expected, nanofluid enhancement has a larger impact for poorly performing baseline heat exchangers. For a single-pass cross-flow configuration, with both fluids unmixed, the ratio of heat capacity rates is unimportant in nanofluid enhancement. Among all flow arrangements investigated, the concentric-tube, counterflow arrangement shows highest improvement in heat duty for a prescribed convective heat-transfer enhancement. The enhancement in convection also suggests a significant saving of heat-transfer area/material, and the saving also increases with the resistance ratio of the enhanced stream to the overall thermal resistance. The impact of specific heat reduction due to the existence of nanoparticles in the stream is also investigated.
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U2 - 10.1080/01457632.2011.584814
DO - 10.1080/01457632.2011.584814
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:80052587636
SN - 0145-7632
VL - 33
SP - 31
EP - 41
JO - Heat Transfer Engineering
JF - Heat Transfer Engineering
IS - 1
ER -