Applications of Nanofluids and Various Minichannel Configurations for Heat Transfer Improvement: A Review of Numerical Study

Abstract

Nanofluid technology is regarded as one of the key emerging technologies that is presently attracting great effort with the aim to provide improved thermal fluid for efficient dissipation of high heat flux generating devices. In this paper, some recent advances in using nanofluid as heat transfer enhancement fluid with consideration of effects of variation of minichannel configuration as flow passage and effective parameters used to obtain optimum thermal parameters as well as correlations used to solve those parameters were systematically reviewed based on relevant numerical studies. Most of researchers concluded that adding nanoparticles usually in size of 1 – 100 nm in a base fluid can considerably improve heat transfer rate and consequently enhanced convective heat transfer coefficient (HTC), however, with a penalty on pressure drop, which consequently demands more pumping power of working fluid.