Hydro-thermal phenomena of oil-multi-walled carbon nanotubes nano-fluid flow through a rectangular channel: impact of obstacles

Abstract

Thermo-hydraulic analysis of nano-fluid flow phenomena through rectangular channels has currently created much interest among researchers, and is being used in a variety of engineering applications (including glass blowing, and continuous metal casting, especially in a variety of manufacturing processes like transpiration cooling, and laser pulse heating). The hydrothermal properties of nano-fluid flow in a rectangular channel embedded with obstacles under uniform heat flux have been studied numerically with the variations of the values of Reynolds numbers ( 𝑅𝑒 ) and different forms of obstacle. The governing equations have been solved using the finite volume approach, and fluent software has been used to visualize the simulation results. The impact of various forms of obstacle (plane, trapezoidal, elliptical, and triangular), the volume fraction of nano-particle (D%), and 𝑅𝑒 on the different thermo-hydraulic fluid flow phenomena have been investigated numerically. At 𝑅𝑒 = 1, 60, 120 , and 𝐷% ∈ [0 − 4], the distributions of flow velocity, absolute pressure drop ( ∆𝑝 ) , temperature profile, average friction factor ( 𝑓 ) , local Nusselt number ( 𝑁𝑢 ( 𝑥 )) , and average Nusselt number ( 𝑁𝑢 𝑎𝑣𝑔 ) have been demonstrated for all the forms of obstacle. It has been discovered that, in terms of the various characteristics of hydrothermal flow phenomena, plane obstacles are more pronounced, whereas elliptical obstacles are less pronounced.