A review of entropy generation in nanofluid flow

The development and use of nanofluids, i.e., dilute suspensions of nanoparticles in liquids, have found a wide range of applications in consumer products, nanomedicine, energy conversion, and microsystem cooling. Of special interest is the use of nanofluid flow for enhanced convection heat transfer to achieve rapid cooling of high heat-flux devices. However, for proper optimization of such thermal engineering systems in terms of design and operation, not only the heat transfer has to be maximized but the entropy generation has to be minimized as well. In this paper, theoretical and computational contributions on entropy generation due to flow and heat transfer of nanofluids in different geometries and flow regimes are reviewed. First, a variety of models used to calculate the thermophysical properties of nanofluids are presented. Then, the effects of thermal nanofluid flow on the rate of entropy generation for different applications are discussed. Finally, some suggestions for future work are presented. The aim of this review paper is to motivate the researchers to pay more attention to the entropy generation analysis of heat and fluid flow of nanofluids to improve the system performance. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.