Heat Transfer Study of Water-based Nanofluids Containing Titanium Oxide Nanoparticles

This paper presents the heat transfer study of TiO2/water Nanofluids with different concentrations. Nanofluids have emerged as an exciting new class of nanotechnology based heat transfer fluids and have grown enormously in the past few years. Nanofluids increases the performance of heat exchanging devices than the conventional working fluids. In the present work, TiO2/water nanofluids with various volume concentrations of 0.1%,0.25%,0.5% and0.75% were prepared using two step method for heat transfer study. Stability, thermal conductivity and viscosity measurement was conducted using zeta potential, KD2 Pro and Brookfield Viscometer respectively. Finally, the experiment was conducted using TiO2/water nanofluids as working fluid in a tube heat exchanger to study the heat transfer performance. The experimental results show that the nusselt number increases with an increase of particle volume fraction and the nusselt number enhancement was observed to be 13.2% over the base fluid for volume concentration of 0.75%. From the experimental observations, enhancement in Nusselt number is larger than the enhancement in friction factor. © 2015 Elsevier Ltd.