Project Description

Heat transfer plays a crucial role in many thermal engineering systems. One of the major problems encountered by many heat transfer systems is the removal of heat generation or dissipation which can be achieved by cooling mechanism. In many industries, cooling operation using conventional heat transfer fluids such as water, ethylene glycol (EG), pumping oil etc as coolants. But these conventional fluids do not show much capability for cooling applications due to their weak thermal performance. To overcome this problem, a new class of heat transfer fluids were developed for reducing the cost and meeting the demands of industries. Nanofluids are one among such heat transfer fluids which can enhance the thermal properties of base fluids to a remarkable level. Although, a considerable amount of work has been conducted on these types of nanofluids, the thermal enhancement does not exceed more than 20%. This motivates us to focus on preparation of cost effective morphology based oxidation resistant copper nanofluids using a simple chemical reduction techniques for achieving more than 50% thermal enhancement as compared to base fluids. In this project, more than 50 % of thermal enhancement can be achieved by preparing copper nanofluids with different shapes of nanoparticles and performing some post synthetic treatment techniques such as washing of polymers or surfactants on the surface of nanostructures.