Two-phase mixture model for nanofluid turbulent flow and heat transfer: Effect of heterogeneous distribution of nanoparticles

- Two-phase mixture model of SiO2/water nanofluids in turbulent flow is proposed.
- Heterogeneity of concentration due to crossed effect and Brownian motion are considered.
- Considering heterogeneous concentration gives more close results to experimental data.

In this work, a two-phase mixture model for evaluation of flow and heat transfer performance of SiO2/water nanofluids under turbulent flow was proposed by considering the heterogeneity of concentration due to crossed effect and the influences of shear rate, viscosity gradient, thermophoresis and Brownian motion on the diffusion of the nanoparticles. The effects of Peclet number, Reynolds number, nanoparticle size and nanofluid mean concentration on the distribution of nanoparticles have been evaluated. The values of thermal conductivity and viscosity as the main thermophysical properties of nanofluids changed across different layers of the liquid due to the heterogeneous distribution of concentration. It was observed that an increase in the Peclet number caused heterogeneity in the distribution of the properties. The achieved nanoparticle distribution has been implemented for analysis of nanofluid using two-phase mixture model. It was found that the effect of nanofluid concentration on the Nusselt number was more noticeable in lower Reynolds numbers due to the insignificant effect of flow momentum on heat transfer. The maximum of 43.9% enhancement in convection heat transfer was achieved by dispersion of 4% SiO2 nanoparticles inside DI-water at Re = 25,000.