Investigation of the Effect of Geometry and Type of Nanofluids on the Heat Transfer Inside the Microchannel using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD)

The purpose of this article is the numerical study of flow and heat transfer characteristics of Nanofluids inside a cylindrical microchannel with rectangular, triangular, and circular cross-sections. The size and shape of these sections have a significant impact on the thermal and hydraulic performance of the microchannel heat exchanger. The Nanofluids used in this work include water and De-Ethylene Glycol (DEG) as the base fluids and Al2O3, Cu, SiO2 and CuO as the nanoparticles. To solve the problem and extract the required data, a 3-D simulation was performed for the microchannel using ANSYS FLUENT 15.0 software and the effect of the cross-sectional shape of the fluid flow and the type of nanoparticles on the thermal transfer and fluid flow parameters was studied. From the obtained results, it can be observed that the addition of nanoparticles to the base fluid increases the heat transfer and pressure drop. The results also show that rectangular channels have the best performance among the three geometries examined as its heat transfer coefficient was 19.26% higher than the triangular cross section which had the worst performance.