The industry fosters many types of heat exchangers such double pipe or plate heat exchangers (HX), but lately the plate HX are gaining the high ground in many applications. Such a plate HX is made out of serial plate modules packed together allowing the warm and cold fluids to pass through and exchange the heat. The paper is demonstrating the functioning of a medium sized plate HX functioning with 10% Al₂O₃ and water nanofluids flowing in both cold and warm sides of the HX. The influence of the nanofluid properties will be investigated as impact upon the outlet temperature of the fluid leaving the HX. Using the RSM methodology. The main conclusion of this study is that there is a balance between the nanofluids increased conductivity and their increased viscosity. The nanofluids are working well for those applications where the flow is not impeded by narrow fluid passages where the bigger influence of the viscosity is actually worsening the heat transfer conditions instead of increasing it, since the influence of viscosity in that kind of applications is three time bigger. A nanofluid conductivity threshold was also detected over which the nanofluids say with 15$ or 20% alumina content is useless for the overall heat transfer conditions.

Date Published: 14 December 2016
PDF: 10 pages
Proc. SPIE 10010, Advanced Topics in Optoelectronics, Microelectronics, and Nanotechnologies VIII, 1001021 (14 December 2016); doi: 10.1117/12.2241677

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 10010:
Advanced Topics in Optoelectronics, Microelectronics, and Nanotechnologies VIII
Marian Vladescu; Cornel T. Panait; Razvan Tamas; George Caruntu; Ionica Cristea, Editor(s)