Engineering Mechanics

Proceedings Vol. 25 (2019)

ENGINEERING MECHANICS 2019

Copyright © 2019 Institute of Thermomechanics of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague

 

S.Venkata Sai Sudheer, K.Kiran Kumar, Karthik Balasubramanian: 
pages 347 - 350, full text

Natural Circulation Loops (NCLs) are widely used in thermal engineering applications such as cooling of nuclear reactors, geo-thermal heat extraction and waste heat recovery. Performance of NCL could be enhanced by improving the transport properties and heat transfer characteristics of the working fluid. Nanofluid, is a stabilized suspensions of nanoparticles (usually <100 nm size) in conventional fluids. They are evolving as potential enhanced heat transfer fluids in recent time due to their higher thermal conductivity and higher heat transfer coefficient (HTC) compared to the base fluid. This paper presents numerical investigation of the steady state behaviour of a two-phase natural circulation loop filled with Al2O3 nanofluid using water as the base fluid. Three nanofluid particle concentrations are (0.001%, 0.01%, and 0.05%) considered in this study. The numerical analysis is carried out by considering, Two-phase Homogeneous Equilibrium Model (THEM) and the systems of equations are solved by an in-house code written in MATLAB. Results demonstrate that increase in nanoparticles volume concentration, increases the mass flow rate of the working fluid inside the loop which results in reduction of thermal resistance.

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