ANALYTICAL SOLUTION FOR

CONVECTIVE HEATTRANSFER OF
NANOFLUIDS FLOW IN ISOTHERMAL
PIPES

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements

for the degree of
Master of Technology

by

HARIKRISHNAN NAMPOOTHIRI V

Division of Mechanical Engineering

Cochin University of Science and Technology, Kochi-22
April 2021
COCHIN UNIVERSITY OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING

CERTIFICATE

This is to certify that the seminar report entitled

ANALYTICAL SOLUTION FOR CONVECTIVE
HEATTRANSFER OF NANOFLUIDS FLOW IN
ISOTHERMAL PIPES

was submitted by

HARIKRISHNAN NAMPOOTHIRI V

of second semester Division of Mechanical Engineering of the

School of Engineering in partial fulfillment of the requirement
for the award of the Degree of Master of Technology in
Thermal Engineering of
Cochin University of Science and Technology
during the year 2021

Head of the Division

Dr. James Varghese

Coordinators

Dr. Tide P. S.

Mr. Joshy P.J.

 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

First of all I thank the Almighty for providing me with the strength and courage to
present this seminar.

ˆ I use this opportunity to express my sincere gratitude towards Dr. James Varghese ,
Head of the Department of Mechanical Engineering, for his assistance and guidance for
successful completion of the seminar.

ˆ I wish to express my deep sense of gratitude to Professor Dr. Tide P.S and Asst. Prof.
Mr. Joshy P.J, Department of Mechanical Engineering who guided me throughout the
seminar. Their overall direction and guidance has also been responsible for the successful
completion of seminar.

ˆ I am also indebted to all the teaching and non-teaching staff of department of Me-
chanical Engineering for their cooperation and suggestions, which is the spirit behind this
report.

ˆ Last but not least I wish to express my sincere thanks to my parents, my brother
and all my friends for their goodwill and constructive ideas which helped me a lot for the
successful presentation of the seminar.

HARIKRISHNAN NAMPOOTHIRI V
April 2021
School of Engineering
Cochin University of Science and Technology, Kochi-22
 ABSTRACT

ˆ This study presents a new exact-analytical solution for convective heat transfer of
thermally fullydeveloped laminar nanofluid flows in a circular tube for the first time. In
this problem, the pipe wall is exposed to a constant temperature. The solution is based on
the Whittaker function and perturbation technique. In the nanofluid model, it is assumed
that nanoparticles and base-fluid behave as a singlephase with average properties. In this
study, the effects of Reynolds number, volume fraction of the particles, Peclet number,
and particle diameter are investigated on the average heat transfer coefficient, surface
mass transfer, and Nusselt number.
Contents

1 Introduction 1

2 MATHEMATICAL GOVERNINGEQUATIONS 4
2.1 MATHEMATICAL GOVERNINGEQUATIONS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
2.2 METHOD OF SOLUTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

3 VALIDATION OF SOLUTION 9

4 RESULTS AND DISCUSSION 11

4.1 Effect of Reynolds Number . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

5 Conclusion 14

Bibliography 15

i
Chapter 1

Introduction

Heat transfer of laminar flow in pipes is an important phenomenon for industries.

Some modern applications can be seen in heat-exchangers, micro-fabrication processes,
electronic devices, micro-electromechanical systems, and etc.. Therefore, the studies of
this phenomenon are of great worth in design and heat transfer controlling of mentioned
equipments efficiently. Todays, conventional fluids such as water, oils, and ethyleneglycol
are still widely used for heat removal purposes. However, these types of fluids remain
penalized by their limited thermal conductivity. This issue is a serious limitation in
improving the performance and compactness of the mentioned devices. Therefore, several
researches focusing on heat transfer phenomena, with nanofluids as working fluids, have
been accomplished during the last decade in order to test their potential for heat transfer
enhancement. As is well-known, nanofluids are containing nanoparticles with dimensions
smaller than 100 [nm] (such as Cu, Ag, CuO, Al2O3, TiO2) suspended in a base fluid
(such as water and oils). Indeed, the Brownian motion and high thermal conductivity of
the nanoparticles are the main potential contributors to this enhancement .

Among the large number of studies on the subject of nanofluids flow, a significant num-
ber also is assigned to experimental/numerical investigation on flows inside the straight
circular conduits. Some of the mentioned recent works are discussed here. Xuan and
Li conductedconducted experiments with CuO-nanofluid flow inside a horizontal circu-
lar tube and reported higher heat transfer coefficient compared to base fluid. Wen and
Ding performed an experimental investigation into convective heat transfer of laminar
Al2O3-water flow at the entrance region of a tube at Re = 500 2100. They showed
that heat transfer enhanced with increasing the Reynolds number and volume fraction of
nanoparticles.

Zeinali-Heris et al. measured the heat transfer in CuO/Al2O3–water flow through a

tube with constant wall temperature. In their results, higher heat transfer enhancement
for Al2O3-water can be observed. Ding et al. experimentally studied the heat transfer
of the carbonnanotubes- water (CNT) flow inside a horizontal tube (Re = 800 1200).
They proposed that the obtained large heat transfer enhancement may be caused by
the reduction of thermal boundary layer thickness and the high thermal conductivity of
nanotubes. Zeinali-Heris et al. [8] experimentally investigated heat transfer of Al2O3-
water inside a circular tube with constant wall temperature. Also, Zeinali-Heris et al.
investigated numerically laminar-flow convective heat transfer in a circular tube for dif-
ferent nanoparticles in different sizes. Syam-Sundar et al. examined the heat transfer

1
behaviour of laminar nanofluids flows (Al2O3, CuO and TiO2) in a pipe under constant
heat flux boundary condition. Kolade et al. measured the effective thermal conductivity
of nanofluids under thermally developing convective boundary layer conditions in a tube
for 500 Re 1600 with constant heat flux.

Alammar and Hu carried out some numerical analyses to examine the axisymmetric
laminar flow and the heat transfer characteristics of some different nanofluids through
a pipe with a uniform heat flux. They found that the oxide-based nanofluids have the
least heat transfer rate when compared with the elements-based nanofluids. Lotfi et al.
numerically studied laminar and turbulent forced convection of Al2O3-water nanofluid
in horizontal tubes. Sundar and Sharma determined experimentally the convective heat
transfer coefficient and friction factor data at various volume concentrations of Al2O3
for flow in a circular tube. They developed a generalized regression equation for the
estimation of friction factor and Nusselt number. Bajestan et aldemonstrated numerical
calculation of convective heat transfer for laminar nanofluid flows inside a straight and
a 90º-curved pipe under constant heat flux. The obtained results showed that both the
nanoparticle and curvature improve the heat transfer, but they increase the pressure drop.
Moraveji et al. investigated numerically convective heat transfer in developing region of
laminar Al2O3-water flow inside a tube with constant heat flux. They suggested a new
correlation for Nusselt number.

The convection heat transfer of laminar Al2O3-water flows inside a vertical/horizontal

tube. They used a uniform wall heat flux for the outer boundary condition. They studied
the effects of concentration of nanoparticles and power supply on the development of
thermal field. Azimi and Kalbasi scrutinized the thermal boundary layer at the forced
convective heat transfer of fully developed laminar nanofluids flows in a circular tube.
Tang et al. conducted experimental measurements to find the viscosity and friction factors
of Al2O3-water flows at volume concentrations of 6indicated that, when the nanofluid
properties are fittingly described, the friction factors of the nanofluid are excellently in
agreement with classical theory for homogenous-phase flow. Heyhat et al. presented the
heat transfer coefficient and friction factor of the fully developed laminar Al2O3-water
flowing in a horizontal tube under constant wall temperature conditions. Pirhayati et al.
performed an experimental investigation to study convective heat transfer of CuO-oil flow
inside an inclined tube under uniform heat flux condition.

The results showed that the heat transfer coefficient with different weight fractions of
nanoparticles increases with the increasing Reynolds number. Mohammed et al. carried
out a numerical simulation to study the effects of different nanofluids on the thermal
and flow fields through circular tubes fitted with inserts under uniform heat flux condi-
tion. The results indicated that the Nusselt number is enhanced with the increase of the
nanoparticles volume fraction and with the decrease of nanoparticles diameter. Li and
Nakayama obtained exact solutions for thermally and hydrodynamically fully developed
nanofluid flows in a circular tube subjected to a constant heat flux.

The above mentioned literature review shows that, most of the research work regarding
to nanofluids flows inside the straight circular tubes is devoted to pure numerical and ex-
perimental methods (especially subjected to a constant heat flux). Hence, in the present

2
study a new exact-analytical solution for convective heat transfer of thermally and hydro-
dynamically fullydeveloped laminar nanofluid flows in a circular tube is introduced, for
the first time. In this problem, the pipe wall is exposed to a constant temperature. The
solution is based on the Whittaker function and perturbation technique. In the nanofluid
model, it is assumed that nanoparticles and base-fluid behave as a single-phase with aver-
age properties (homogeneous phase model). In this study, the effects of Reynolds number,
volume fraction of the particles, Peclet number, and particle diameter are investigated on
the average heat transfer coefficient, surface mass transfer, and Nusselt number.

3
Chapter 2

MATHEMATICAL
GOVERNINGEQUATIONS

2.1 MATHEMATICAL GOVERNINGEQUATIONS

The laminar steady nanofluid flow through a straight horizontal pipe under an isother-
mal boundary condition is considered, as shown in Fig. 1. Here, x is flow direction, r is
radial direction, R is pipe radius, u is flow velocity in x -direction, and By considering u
= u(r ) , and neglecting the radial and tangential velocity components for fully-developed
laminar regime.

Figure 2.1: Geometry of pipe with isothermal wall.

4
 The governing equations including x -momentum, energy,and nanoparticles concentra-
tion in dimensional form are as follows.

where, T (r , x) is fluid temperature, Tm (x) is a reference temperature (here this is

bulk-temperature), (r,x ) is nanoparticle concentration, DT is thermophoretic diffusion
coefficient, DB is Brownian diffusion coefficient, c is specific heat capacity, is density, is
viscosity, and k is thermal conductivity, The subscripts p and nf refer to the nanoparticles
and nanofluid, respectively

In a fullydeveloped thermal condition, the axial gradient of dimensionless temperature

and nanoparticle concentration is zero.

The axial mixed mean temperature gradient is also achieved by considering the heat
balance on a differential axial control volume.

hnf is local convective heat transfer coefficient

5
 Substituting Eqs. (4) and (5) into Eq. (2), the dimensionless form of the heat transfer
equation is expressed:

The dimensionless form of the heat transfer equation is expressed:

6
2.2 METHOD OF SOLUTION
For typical nanofluids flow inside a pipe under the laminar condition (250 ¡ Renf ¡ 2300)
The value of Nt is at least 100 times less than Reynolds number.

Therefore, by considering the boundary conditions 0(1) = 0 and 0’=(0), the physical
solution for 0 is expressed.

By applying central difference discretizing method around space grid-point i - 1/2 to

Eq. (13), it is achieved

Where r is the step for radial direction. Finally, Eq.(14) are solved using Newton’s
method ,where k is the iterative index . In this study, a homogenous single-phase model
for analyzing nanofluids properties is utilized.

where, dp denotes diameter of the nanoparticle, T is temperature of the medium, and

is a parameter that differs according to the type of the nanoparticles.

7
8
Chapter 3

VALIDATION OF SOLUTION

The variation of heat transfer coefficient (hnf) with volume fraction (0.01 0.05) and
diameter (10 nm dp 50nm) of alumina in water is calculated for a straight pipe with
length of L =1m and diameter of D =2R =6mm .

Figure 3.1: Enhancement in heat transfer coefficient of water/ Al2O3 at different nanopar-
ticle diameters and various volume fractions.

The inlet bulk temperature of nanofluid is Tm,in 298K and the constant wall temper-
ature is Tw 373K . hnf and Nunf could be calculated via Eq. (16)

9
Figure 3.2: Enhancement in heat transfer coefficient at different nanoparticle concentra-
tions and Reynolds number (a) water/Al2O3 nanofluids flow (b) water/CuO nanofluids
flow.

Figure 3.3: Profile of dimensionless temperature of water/Al2O3 nanofluids flow at dif-

ferent nanoparticle concentrations.

10
Chapter 4

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

In this section, the effect of Reynolds number, nanoparticle volume fraction, and particle
diameter on convective heat transfer and profile of dimensionless temperature, (r), are
presented for different values of governing parameters.

4.1 Effect of Reynolds Number

The first examination belongs to the effect of Reynolds number on hydrodynamic and
thermal behavior of nanofluids flow. For this purpose, it is supposed that 250 Ref 2000
and 0.01 0.05. Both CuO and Al2O3 nanoparticles with diameter of dp = 20 nm are
considered in these simulations. Figures 3(a) and 3(b) show the relative convective heat
transfer coefficient of the nanofluid (hnf/hf) for Al2O3 and CuO colloids, respectively.
The results indicate that like a pure fluid flow in laminar thermally and hydrodynam-
ically fully developed region, hnf of nanofluids flow remains constant by increasing Ref
in various . In addition, the results illustrate that Al2O3 has better heat transfer rate
because of the better Brownian motion characteristic which is specified by the kBr in
mathematical formulation. Figure 4 presents the profile of dimensionless temperature,
(r), for Al2O3/water nanofluids in the case of 0.01 0.05 and Ref = 750 (as hnf does not
change with Reynolds number, only one Ref has been selected). The results show that by
increasing the nanoparticles volume concentration, the difference between the wall tem-
perature and fluid temperature decreases, as expected. At the end, presenting the values
of Nunf for various nanoparticles volume concentration for both Al2O3 and CuO would
be worthwhile

11
Figure 4.1: Nusselt number (Nunf) for various nanoparticles volume concentration for
Al2O3 and CuO colloids.

12
Figure 4.2: Enhancement in heat transfer coefficient at different nanoparticle concentra-
tions and Peclet number (a) water/ Al2O3 nanofluids flow (b) water/CuO nanofluids flow.

The effect of Peclet number,, on the convective heat transfer coefficient of the
nanofluids flow is investigated. it is supposed that 2000 Pef 9000 and 0.01 0.05 and
both CuO and Al2O3 with diameter of 10 nm dp 50 nm are considered. Figures 6(a)
and 6(b) explain the relative convective heat transfer coefficient (hnf/hf) of
Al2O3/water and CuO/water with = 0.03 and various dp,respectively. The results
display that heat transfer enhancement decreases with particle diameter because of the
degradation in Brownian motion of the particles.

beginfigure[hp]

Figure 4.4: Enhancement in heat transfer coefficient at different nanoparticle diameter

and Peclet number (a) water/Al2O3 nanofluids flow (b) water/CuO nanofluids flow.

13
Chapter 5

Conclusion

The purpose of this study is to introduce a new exactanalytical solution for convective
heat transfer of laminar thermally and hydrodynamically fully-developed nanofluid flows
in a circular tube, for the first time. In this case, the pipe wall is exposed to a constant
temperature. The solution methodology is based on the Whittaker function and pertur-
bation technique. In the present study, the effects of Reynolds number, volume fraction of
the particles, Peclet number, and particle diameter are investigated on the average heat
transfer coefficient, surface mass transfer, and Nusselt number. Some important obtained
results are briefly described below:

Like a pure fluid flow, in the laminar fully developed region, the convective heat transfer
coefficient of nanofluids flow remains constant by increasing Reynolds number in various
nanoparticles volume concentrations.
By increasing the nanoparticles volume concentration, the difference between the wall
temperature and fluid temperature decreases.
Convective heat transfer enhancement does not change considerably with the base fluid
Peclet number for laminar thermally and hydrodynamically fully developed nanofluid flow
in a tube.
The nanoparticle mass transfer rate on the tube wall decreases with the increase in
nanoparticle concentration, but it increases with the increase in particle diameter.

14
Bibliography

[1] Mirmasoumi, S. and Behzadmehr, A., “Numerical Study of Laminar Mixed Convec-
tion of a Nanofluid in a Horizontal Tube Using Two-Phase Mixture Model,” Applied
Thermal Engineering, 28, pp. 717-727 (2008).

[2] Sattler, K. D., Handbook of Nanophysics: Nanoparticles and Quantum Dots, CRC
Press-Taylor Francis Group, Boca Raton, pp. 33487-2742 (2011).

[3] Li, Q. and Xuan, Y., “Convective Heat Transfer and Flow Characteristic of Cu–Water
Nanofluid,” Science in China, Series E, 45, pp. 408-416 (2002).

[4] Zeinali-Heris, S., Nasr-Esfahany, M. and Etemad, S. G., “Experimental Investigation

of Convective Heat Transfer of Al2O3/Water Nanofluid in Circular Tube,” Interna-
tional Journal of Heat and Fluid Flow, 28, pp. 203-210 (2007).

[5] Ben Mansour, R., Galanis, N. and Nguyen, C., “Experimental Study of Mixed Convec-
tion with Water– Al2O3 Nanofluid in Inclined Tube with Uniform Wall Heat Flux,”
International Journal of Thermal Sciences, 50, pp. 403-410 (2011).

[6] Tang, C. C., Tiwari, S. and Cox, M. W., “Viscosity and Friction Factor of Aluminum
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15