ABSTRACT
Heat exchanger plays a major role in the industrial process heating. Heat is transferred between fluids by convection and conduction through the walls of the heat exchanger. Heat transfer fluids have low thermal conductivity that greatly limits the heat exchanger efficiency. Various research works are carried out to enhance the thermal properties of the fluids by adding thermally conductive solids into liquids. Liquid mixed with nanoparticles known as ‘nanofluid’, exhibit substantially higher thermal conductivity than those of the corresponding base fluids. In this work a new nanofluid system has been developed by synthesizing aluminium oxide and silicon carbide nanoparticles with water and applied in a shell and tube heat exchanger. The thermal transport properties of this nanofluid, including thermal conductivity and heat transfer coefficient are characterized. The results show that this nanofluid possesses higher thermal transport properties and it has been experimentally proved that this nanofluid has the potential to be used as advanced heat transfer fluid. Experimental data have been generated in shell and tube heat exchanger using nanofluid and Li and Xuan correlation was used for the verification of the experimental data. The results also predict that Al2O3 act as a better nanoparticle in comparison to SiC due to high thermo-physical properties of the mixture, yield in the increase in heat transfer. Experimental results show that application of Al2O3/SiC based nanofluid enhances coefficient of heat transfer at 0.3% concentration by volume and a flow rate of 5 LPM respectively.
