Numerical assessment of the overall heat transfer and pressure drop performances of an aqueous ammonia base-nanofluids in rectangular microchannel heat sinks
Author(s):
Ahmed Mohammed Adham†, Hussein A. Mohammed‡
Affiliation(s):
† Department of Mechanical and Energy Engineering Techniques, Erbil Technical Engineering College, Erbil Polytechnic University, Erbil, 44001, Iraq.
‡ School of Engineering, Edith Cowan University (ECU), Joondalup WA 6027, Australia
Corresponding Author Email: [email protected]; [email protected]
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
In this paper, the thermal and hydrodynamic performances of an aqueous ammonia base-nanofluid (Al2O3-NH3(aqu)) cooled in a rectangular microchannel heat sink was numerically investigated. The range of Reynolds number used in the investigation were between 140-1400. In order to assess the performance of the system during the employment of the proposed nanofluid, H2O and Al2O3-H2O were also tested and their performances were compared to Al2O3-NH3(aqu) performance in terms of thermal resistance and pressure drop. Results from the simulation showed that the proposed nanofluid outperformed pure water and slightly higher than Al2O3-H2O in terms of thermal resistance (for Re = 1400, 0.0474, 0.0449 and 0.04647 oK/W for H2O, Al2O3-H2O and Al2O3-NH3(aqu), respectively). However, it exceeds the performance of both pure water and Al2O3-H2O in terms of pressure drop (for Re = 1400, 785288, 911217, 753591 Pa for H2O, Al2O3-H2O and Al2O3-NH3(aqu), respectively). The key findings from the current study may be used to attract more research about the proposed nanofluid to be used in the cooling process of microchannel heat sinks.