NUMERICAL STUDY 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, 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 Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes-based 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 possessed approximately 9.63 x 10(6) elements and was used for both the laminar and turbulent flows. The results show that a considerable heat transfer enhancement was achieved using these nanofluids, and the energy-based performance comparisons indicate that some of them represent a more efficient heat transfer medium for this type of application. In general, all nanofluids caused higher pressure losses due to friction than water.