Modeling of turbulent forced convective heat transfer and friction factor in a tube for Fe3o4 magnetic nanofluid with computational fluid dynamics

A numerical study based on the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) method, with a single phase approach, has been presented to determine the effects of nanoparticle concentration and flow rate on the convective heat transfer and friction factor of nanofluid flowing through a plain copper tube in turbulent regime with different Reynolds numbers (3000 < Re < 22000). The nanofluid consists of Fe3o4 magnetic nanoparticles, with the average diameter of 36 nm, suspended in water as a base fluid with four particle concentrations of 0.02, 0.1, 0.6 vol.%. Applying the modeling results, two relations were developed to estimate the Nusselt number and friction factor, based on the dimensionless numbers. The results showed that the modeling data were in very good agreement with experimental data. The maximum error was around 10%.