Heat Transfer Engineering, Vol.38, No.17, 1496-1505, 2017
Experimental Study of Thermo-Physical Properties of Nanofluids Based on -Fe2O3 Nanoparticles for Heat Transfer Applications
The main goal of the present study was to prepare and also to investigate the effects of both temperature and weight concentration on the thermo-physical properties of -Fe2O3/water nanofluids. The -Fe2O3 nanoparticles were synthesized by laser pyrolysis technique and characterized using TEM, XRD, and EDX techniques. Thermal conductivity, viscosity and surface tension of -Fe2O3/water nanofluids were investigated within the range of the temperature of 20 degrees C to 70 degrees C for various weight concentrations of nanoparticles (0.5, 1.0, 2.0, and 4.0wt%). The experimental results show that the thermal conductivity ratio is much higher than of thermal conductivity of base fluid. Thus, the relative thermal conductivity was 59% for a concentration of 4.0wt% and a temperature of 50 degrees C. Also, it has been observed that the influence of weight concentration of nanoparticles on viscosity was lower at temperatures over 55 degrees C. At standard temperature of 25 degrees C and 2.0wt.% concentration of nanoparticles, the relative dynamic viscosity was 5.61%. Experimental results show that the surface tension increases with increase of weight concentrations and decreases with increase of temperatures. For a temperature of 70 degrees C and 2.0wt.% concentration of nanoparticles, the relative surface tension was 46%. The experimental results were compared with data available in literature.