Numerical Investigation of Heat Transfer Performance and Flow Characteristics of Nanofluids and MEPCM Slurry in the Microchannel Heat Sinks

The purpose of this article was to study the numerical comparison of heat transfer performance and flow characteristics of Nanofluids and micro-encapsulated phase change material (MEPCM) slurry in microchannel heat sinks with rectangular cross-sections Working fluid in this research was water-based NFs with different nanoparticles such as Cu, SiO2, Al2O3 and MEPCM slurry. The 3-D simulation has been performed for the microchannel using ANSYS FLUENT 15.0 software to solve the problem and extract the required data. Obtained results have shown that adding particles to the base fluid may increase the heat transfer and pressure drop. Furthermore, Al2O3 had the highest heat transfer coefficient (HTC). Moreover, the results showed that Al2O3 nanoparticle can improve the heat transfer property of pure water up to 25% and Also, MEPCMs increased the heat transfer rate by 18%.

Keywords:

Convection Heat Transfer , Micro-Channel , Heat Exchanger , Nanofluids , MEPCM Slurry