A different look at the effect of temperature on the nanofluids thermal conductivity: focus on the experimental-based models

This paper takes a different look at the mathematical modeling of the effective thermal conductivity of nanofluids. Most related published experimental-based mathematical models have been analyzed statistically. The sensitivity analysis showed that in the most published models, the role of nanofluids bulk temperature may be ignored. Then, we extracted a lot of data from the models in the valid ranges of variables. The next step was performing statistical analysis of the variances and means of different datasets (data populations). The results showed that changing considerably the nanofluids temperature doesn’t affect considerably the nanofluids thermal conductivity. We introduced a comprehensive, simpler and more accurate correlation neglecting the nanofluids temperature to predict the effective thermal conductivity of nanofluids. Results indicated that the predicted values using the proposed correlation are in a good agreement with experimental data.