A non-Fourier approach towards the analysis of heat transfer enhancement with water based nanofluids through a channel

In this article, a non-Fourier approach to model the heat transfer phenomenon in nanofluids having application to automotive industry is studied. In this respect, a recently proposed hyperbolic heat flux equation is embedded into the heat energy equation and thereby incorporating the effect of thermal relaxation time. Nanofluids are formed by considering copper oxide (CuO), Titanium dioxide (TiO2) and Aluminum oxide (Al2O3) nano-solid particles in the base fluid. The flow governing system of PDEs along with boundary conditions is transformed into its respective coupled system of nonlinear ODEs using suitable similarity functions. Runge-Kutta-Fehlberg (RK-5) numerical scheme embedded with shooting method is implemented and used to solve the obtained boundary value problem. Numerical simulations are performed and tabulated to analyze the influence of solid volume fraction on local coefficient of skin-friction and Nusselt number. A comparison is made between the results by Fourier and present heat flux model. We conclude that the presented new approach is more general and thus allows predicting the influence of thermal relaxation time on the heat transfer characteristics. Moreover, consideration of present model over the Fourier model helps to predict the actual temporal behavior of solution.