COMPUTATIONAL ANALYSIS OF THE PERFORMANCE OF A HEAT PIPE USING NANOFLUID AS A WORKING FLUID

Rodrigo Vidonscky Pinto¹; Flávio Augusto Sanzovo Fiorelli¹

¹ Escola Politécnica da USP

doi:10.20906/CPS/COB-2015-0904

Resumo

Application of nanofluids in heat pipes usually results in satisfactory experimental results regarding heat transfer. However, the existing computational studies connecting heat pipes and nanofluids lack a deeper discussion regarding the models used for the evaluation of the nanofluids properties and the results involving the use of unusual materials, like carbon nanotubes or nanofluids using ethyleneglycol as a base fluid. Thus, the present study analyses the precision of the correlations used for the evaluation of these properties of a nanofluid, and develops a computational code to determine the fields of temperature and velocity, the thermal resistance and the effect of the particles size on the heat transfer of a heat pipe using nanofluids containing the mentioned materials. The computational code uses the finite volume method in order to obtain quantitative results that allow the determination of the most indicated characteristics in order to project and fabricate a heat pipe containing this kind of nanofluids in its interior.

Palavras-chave: Heat pipes; Nanofluids; Computational analysis