A new thermal conductivity model for nanofluids

In a quiescent suspension, nanoparticles move randomly and thereby carry relatively large volumes of surrounding liquid with them. This micro-scale interaction may occur between hot and cold regions, resulting in a lower local temperature gradient for a given heat flux compared with the pure liquid case. Thus, as a result of Brownian motion, the effective thermal conductivity, keff, which is composed of the particles’ conventional static part and the Brownian motion part, increases to result in a lower temperature gradient for a given heat flux. To capture these transport phenomena, a new thermal conductivity model for nanofluids has been developed, which takes the effects of particle size, particle volume fraction and temperature dependence as well as properties of base liquid and particle phase into consideration by considering surrounding liquid traveling with randomly moving nanoparticles.