NUMERICAL INVESTIGATION OF NANOFLUID FLOW AND HEAT TRANSFER IN A PLATE HEAT EXCHANGER

This paper presents a numerical investigation of the flow and heat transfer behavior of two nanofluids, namely CuO-water and Al2O3-water, inside a plate heat exchanger. Both laminar and turbulent flows are studied under steady state conditions. In the turbulent regime the RANSbased Realizable kappa-epsilon turbulence model was used. The homogeneous single-phase fluid model was employed to characterize the nanofluids. All fluid properties were considered temperature dependent. The adopted unstructured mesh possesses approximately 9.63x10(6) elements and was used for both laminar and turbulent flows. Results show that a considerable heat transfer enhancement was achieved using these nanofluids and the energy-based performance comparisons indicate that some of them do represent a more efficient heat transfer medium for this type of application. In general, all nanofluids cause higher pressure losses due to friction compared to that of water.