Structural Analysis and Morphological Study of Al2O3nanofluids in Microchannel Heat Sink

Abstract

Microchannel heat sink is a small device with the ability of creating an innovative cooling technology to remove large amount of heat from small areas. Recently, nanotechnology has gained interest to explore the microchannel cooling benefits of water containing small concentration of nanoparticles as working fluid. It has been found that nanoparticles dispersed with water have increased the heat transfer coefficient in the microchannel. There were number of studies on improving heat transfer in the microchannel using Al2O3 nanofluids. However, there is less study on the effect of the nanoparticles structure after it is used as working fluid in the microchannel heat sink. Therefore, this present study investigates the structures of Al2O3 nanofluids after 10 hours application of Al2O3 nanofluids. It was confirmed by XRD method that the heating process in the microchannel has not changed the structure of Al2O3 nanofluids. According to the XRD, patterns show that the diffraction peaks are sharper after an increase in the temperature. Besides that, the morphological study found that the heating process within the microchannel has increased the grain size of Al2O3 nanofluids. This investigation concluded that the structures of Al2O3 nanofluids have not changed after 10 hours in the heating side whereas an increase in the grain size occurred due to the agglomeration of the particles.