Experimental study on flow and heat transfer of Al-kerosene nanofuels for regenerative cooling application

In this paper, flow resistance and convective heat transfer of Al-kerosene nanofuels are studied experimentally. Al-kerosene nanofuels with mass fractions of 0.5 , 1 , and 2 g/L are prepared and applied as the flow medium for flow and heat transfer experiment via a heating facility. The experiment results indicate that the addition of aluminum nanoparticles has significant influence on both flow resistance and heat transfer performance. Compared to kerosene experiment, friction coefficient, heat transfer coefficient, and Nusselt number of Al-kerosene nanofuels all increase with different increasing rates. With a mass fraction of 1 g/L, the increase rate of friction coefficient was 11%, while the increase rate of heat transfer coefficient and Nusselt number is 19% and 12%, respectively. In order to evaluate the overall flow and heat transfer performance of Al-kerosene nanofuels, a performance evaluation criteria (PEC) is evaluated, and the present experimental results prove that the addition of aluminum nanoparticles gave a gain to the overall thermal performance of kerosene. The present study is aimed to provide useful references for regenerative cooling improvements.