A review of boiling and convective heat transfer with nanofluids

Nanofluids have evoked immense interest from researchers of multi-disciplines from around the globe due to their fascinating thermophysical properties and numerous potential benefits and applications in important fields such as microelectronics, microfluidics, transportation, and biomedical. However, there are many controversies and inconsistencies in reported arguments and experimental results on various thermal characteristics such as effective thermal conductivity, convective heat transfer coefficient and boiling heat transfer rate of nanofluids. As of today, researchers have mostly focused on anomalous thermal conductivity of nanofluids. Although investigations on boiling, droplet spreading, and convective heat transfer are very important in order to exploit nanofluids as the next generation coolants, considerably less efforts have been made on these major features of nanofluids. In this paper, these important cooling features-boiling, spreading, and convective heat transfers of nanofluids are presented together with exhaustive review of research and development made in these areas of nanofluids. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.