The Impact of Volume Fraction and Nanoparticles in the Flow of Nanofluids along the Boundary Layer Over a Flat Plate

Abstract

Introduction: The forced convective, steady, viscous, nonlinear boundary layer flow of a two-dimensional problem over a flat plate with heat transfer nanofluids. The flow is laminar. Two different types of nanoparticles, namely, Titanium dioxide () and Silver are used to prepare nanofluids with base fluid is chosen as water. Nanofluids has a large number of applications in the area of biomedical, cooling and tribological applications.

Objectives: To study about the effect different nanoparticles and their volume fraction in the flow of nanofluids along the boundary layer over a flat plate. Analyse the changes in the viscosity, density, specific heat capacity, thermal conductivity, Prandtl number, skin friction coefficient and Nusselt number.

Methods: The flow of the fluid that are governed by the PDEs that are nonlinear are transformed into the ODEs that are nonlinear by employing similarity transformations, which then solved by the use of MATLAB bvp5c solution procedure.

Results: Both thermal conductivity and heat transfer coefficient increases with the increase in the volume fraction of the corresponding nanoparticle. Also, Silver-water nanofluid has the high thermal conductivity and heat transfer rate when compared with Titanium dioxide-water nanofluid.

Conclusions: Silver water nanofluid surpasses titanium dioxide water nanofluid in terms of thermal conductivity and heat transfer rate. Moreover, the physical attributes like viscosity, density, and thermal conductivity of nanofluids escalate proportionally with the volume fraction of nanoparticles. Conversely, specific heat capacity and Prandtl number exhibit an inverse relationship with the volume fraction of nanoparticles, decreasing as it increases.