Eventos Anais de eventos
COBEM 2023
27th International Congress of Mechanical Engineering
Experimental investigation and numerical simulation of heat transfer and pressure drop of MWCNT/thermal oil nanofluid flowing inside a horizontal tube
Submission Author:
Daniel Florez , MG
Co-Authors:
Daniel Florez, Edwin Martin Cardenas Contreras, Erick Oliveira do Nascimento, ENIO PEDONE BANDARRA FILHO
Presenter: Daniel Florez
doi://10.26678/ABCM.COBEM2023.COB2023-0936
Abstract
This work presents an experimental and numerical simulation performed to evaluate the thermohydraulic performance of multi-walled carbon nanotubes nanoparticles (MWCNT) dispersed in thermal oil, flowing in a horizontal tube under constant heat flux conditions. The main goal is to investigate the effect of adding MWCNT nanoparticles to thermal oil to verify the results in terms of heat transfer and pressure drop. For the experimental part, nanofluids were produced using the sonication process and the volumetric concentrations of 0.01% and 0.02%. The experimental setup was built and instrumented to evaluate the heat transfer coefficient and pressure drop in laminar flow. The inlet temperature was maintained constant at 60 °C, with a mass flow rate of 17 g/s and under constant heat flux conditions on the tube surface of 12 kW/m². The stability of nanofluids was analyzed through visual inspection and UV-VIS absorption spectroscopy in a time span of 720 h. The thermophysical properties including thermal conductivity, dynamic viscosity and density were experimentally measured and their values were used for thermohydraulic performance analysis. For numerical simulation, the same experimental test conditions were considered. The finite volume method implemented in Ansys Fluent software was used, assuming single-phase, Newtonian and incompressible flow. The experimental results showed that the dispersion of carbon nanotubes in thermal oil increased the heat transfer coefficient compared to the base fluid. However, the pressure drop of the nanofluids was higher than that of the base fluid. The numerically obtained results were compared with the experimental data, showing satisfactory agreement. The analysis of the results shows that the addition of MWCNT nanoparticles in thermal oil can significantly improve heat transfer as well as the pressure drop. This work contributes to the understanding of the effects of nanoparticle addition in thermal fluids, which can be important for the development of systems with improved heat transfer performance.
Keywords
Nanofluid, carbon nanotubes, Horizontal tubes, Heat transfer, pressure drop
