A review of the applications of nanofluids in solar energy

Researches on the nanofluids have been increased very rapidly over the past decade. In spite of some inconsistency in the reported results and insufficient understanding of the mechanism of the heat transfer in nanofluids, it has been emerged as a promising heat transfer fluid. In the continuation of nanofluids research, the researchers have also tried to use hybrid nanofluid recently, which is engineered by suspending dissimilar nanoparticles either in mixture or composite form. The idea of using hybrid nanofluids is to further improvement of heat transfer and pressure drop characteristics by trade-off between advantages and disadvantages of individual suspension, attributed to good aspect ratio, better thermal network and synergistic effect of nanomaterials. This review summarizes recent researches on synthesis, thermophysical properties, heat transfer and pressure drop characteristics, possible applications and challenges of hybrid nanofluids. Review showed that proper hybridization may make the hybrid nanofluids very promising for heat transfer enhancement, however, lot of research works is still needed in the fields of preparation and stability, characterization and applications to overcome the challenges.

A review on hybrid nanofluids: Recent research, development and applications

Nanofluids—a simple product of the emerging world of nanotechnology—are suspensions of nanoparticles (nominally 1–100 nm in size) in conventional base fluids such as water, oils, or glycols. Nanofluids have seen enormous growth in popularity since they were proposed by Choi in 1995. In the year 2011 alone, there were nearly 700 research articles where the term nanofluid was used in the title, showing rapid growth from 2006 (175) and 2001 (10). The first decade of nanofluid research was primarily focused on measuring and modeling fundamental thermophysical properties of nanofluids (thermal conductivity, density, viscosity, heat transfer coefficient). Recent research, however, explores the performance of nanofluids in a wide variety of other applications. Analyzing the available body of research to date, this article presents recent trends and future possibilities for nanofluids research and suggests which applications will see the most significant improvement from employing nanofluids.

Small particles, big impacts: A review of the diverse applications of nanofluids

Recent advances in modeling and simulation of nanofluid flows-Part I: Fundamentals and theory

Latest developments on the viscosity of nanofluids

Nanofluids are potential heat transfer fluids with enhanced thermophysical properties and heat transfer performance can be applied in many devices for better performances (i.e. energy, heat transfer and other performances). In this paper, a comprehensive literature on the applications and challenges of nanofluids have been compiled and reviewed. Latest up to date literatures on the applications and challenges in terms of PhD and Master thesis, journal articles, conference proceedings, reports and web materials have been reviewed and reported. Recent researches have indicated that substitution of conventional coolants by nanofluids appears promising. Specific application of nanofluids in engine cooling, solar water heating, cooling of electronics, cooling of transformer oil, improving diesel generator efficiency, cooling of heat exchanging devices, improving heat transfer efficiency of chillers, domestic refrigerator-freezers, cooling in machining, in nuclear reactor and defense and space have been reviewed and presented. Authors also critically analyzed some of the applications and identified research gaps for further research. Moreover, challenges and future directions of applications of nanofluids have been reviewed and presented in this paper. Based on results available in the literatures, it has been found nanofluids have a much higher and strongly temperature-dependent thermal conductivity at very low particle concentrations than conventional fluids. This can be considered as one of the key parameters for enhanced performances for many of the applications of nanofluids. Because of its superior thermal performances, latest up to date literatures on this property have been summarized and presented in this paper as well. However, few barriers and challenges that have been identified in this review must be addressed carefully before it can be fully implemented in the industrial applications.

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H.A. Mohammad

Papers

A review on applications and challenges of nanofluids