Comparison of the effects of measured and computed thermophysical properties of nanofluids on heat transfer performance

This article reports a comparison of the differences between using measured and computed thermophysical properties to describe the heat transfer performance of TiO2–water nanofluids. In this study, TiO2 nanoparticles with average diameters of 21 nm and a particle volume fraction of 0.2–1 vol.% are used. The thermal conductivity and viscosity of nanofluids were measured by using transient hot-wire apparatus and a Bohlin rotational rheometer, respectively. The well-known correlations for calculating the thermal conductivity and viscosity of nanofluids were used for describing the Nusselt number of nanofluids and compared with the results from the measured data. The results show that use of the models of thermophysical properties for calculating the Nusselt number of nanofluids gave similar results to use of the measured data. Where there is a lack of measured data on thermophysical properties, the most appropriate models for computing the thermal conductivity and viscosity of the nanofluids are the models of Yu and Choi and Wang et al., respectively.