Nanoparticles enhancing heat transfer: a CFD investigation

Nanoparticles have demonstrated their capability in experiments for enhancing the heat transfer of the base fluid with a small amount (< 1.0 vol%). But the mechanism by which how the nanoparticles achieved this remains unclear. Often, experimental results were contradictory to each other due to inconsistent conditions. In such scenarios, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) showed significant advantages as an analogy to real experiment. This project uses CFD tools by exploring the possibility to add new source terms into the flow equations to describe the experimental data to obtain a theoretical understanding how the heat transfer enhancement was made by nanoparticles.