Researchers have been perplexed for the past five years with the unusually high thermal conductivity (k) of nanoparticle-laden colloidal solutions (nanofluids). Although various mechanisms and models have been proposed in the literature to explain the high k of these nanofluids, no concrete conclusions have been reached. Through an order-of-magnitude analysis of various possible mechanisms, we show that convection caused by the Brownian movement of these nanoparticles is primarily responsible for the enhancement in k of these colloidal nanofluids.

The thermal conductivity, k, of nanoscale colloidal suspensions (also known as nanofluid), consisting of nanoparticles suspended in a base liquid, is much higher than the thermal conductivity of the base liquid at very small volume fractions of the nanoparticles. However, experimental results from various groups all across the world have shown various anomalies such as a peak in the enhancement of k with respect to nanoparticle size, an increase as well as a decrease in the ratio of k of these colloidal solutions with the k of the base fluid with increasing temperature, and a dependence of k on pH and time. In this paper, the aggregation kinetics of nanoscale colloidal solutions are combined with the physics of thermal transport to capture the effects of aggregation on k. Results show that the observed anomalies reported in experimental work can be well described by taking aggregation kinetics into account. Finally, we show that colloidal chemistry plays a significant role in deciding the k of colloidal nanosuspensions.

Solar energy is one of the best sources of renewable energy with minimal environmental impact. Direct absorption solar collectors have been proposed for a variety of applications such as water heating; however the efficiency of these collectors is limited by the absorption properties of the working fluid, which is very poor for typical fluids used in solar collectors. It has been shown that mixing nanoparticles in a liquid (nanofluid) has a dramatic effect on the liquid thermophysical properties such as thermal conductivity. Nanoparticles also offer the potential of improving the radiative properties of liquids, leading to an increase in the efficiency of direct absorption solar collectors. Here we report on the experimental results on solar collectors based on nanofluids made from a variety of nanoparticles (carbon nanotubes, graphite, and silver). We demonstrate efficiency improvements of up to 5% in solar thermal collectors by utilizing nanofluids as the absorption mechanism. In addition the experimental data were compared with a numerical model of a solar collector with direct absorption nanofluids. The experimental and numerical results demonstrate an initial rapid increase in efficiency with volume fraction, followed by a leveling off in efficiency as volume fraction continues to increase.

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Experimental results on the viscosity of alumina-based nanofluids are reported for various shear rates, temperature, nanoparticle diameter, and nanoparticle volume fraction. From the data it seems that the increase in the nanofluid viscosity is higher than the enhancement in the thermal conductivity as reported in the literature. It is shown, however, that the viscosity has to be increased by more than a factor of 4—relative to the increase in thermal conductivity—to make the nanofluid thermal performance worse than that of the base fluid.