Numerical Study of Heat Transfer Characteristics of Laminar Nanofluids Flow in Oblique Finned Microchannel Heat Sink: Effects of Different Base Fluids and Volume Fraction of Nanoparticles

Abstract

This paper demonstrates a numerical study of heat transfer characteristics of laminar flow in oblique finned microchannel heat sink using nanofluid with Al2O3 nanoparticles added to various base fluids including water, ethylene glycol and turbine oil as coolant fluid. The width of the primary channel was 0.5 mm and the secondary channel was less than 0.15 mm in the oblique finned microchannel heat sink with an aspect ratio of 3. ANSYS Fluent was employed to model the flow in the geometry of microchannel. Single phase model and constant heat flux boundary condition were used in this numerical study. The modeling was validated by comparing the published data for conventional and enhanced microchannel heat sink. The base fluid acted as a comparison baseline to the nanofluid with volume fraction of 1.0% and 4.0%. Besides, the study was carried out in laminar flow regime, whereby the Reynold number ranged between 320 to 700. It was found that turbine oil based nanofluid had the highest Nusselt number among all fluids, followed by ethylene glycol and water to be the least. However, the heat transfer coefficient among all fluids were contrary to the Nusselt number where water achieved the highest heat transfer coefficient. The addition of nanoparticles increased the heat transfer coefficient of all fluids but it did not enhance their Nusselt number except water.