Electrical Conductivity of New Nanoparticle Enhanced Fluids: An Experimental Study

Abstract

In this research, the electrical conductivity of simple and hybrid nanofluids containing Al2O3, TiO2 and SiO2 nanoparticles and water as the base fluid was experimentally studied at ambient temperature and with temperature variation in the range of 20–60 °C. A comparison of the experimental data with existing theoretical models demonstrated that the theoretical models under-predict the experimental data. Consequently, several correlations were developed for nanofluid electrical conductivity estimation in relation to temperature and volume concentration. The electrical conductivity of both simple and hybrid nanofluids increased linearly with both volume concentration and temperature upsurge. More precisely, by adding nanoparticles to water, the electrical conductivity increased from 11 times up to 58 times for both simple and hybrid nanofluids, with the maximum values being attained for the 3% volume concentration. Plus, a three-dimensional regression analysis was performed to correlate the electrical conductivity with temperature and volume fraction of the titania and silica nanofluids. The thermo-electrical conductivity ratio has been calculated based on electrical conductivity experimental results and previously determined thermal conductivity. Very low figures were noticed. Concluding, one may affirm that further experimental work is needed to completely elucidate the behavior of nanofluids in terms of electrical conductivity.

A Review on Electrical Conductivity of Nanoparticle-Enhanced Fluids

“…Studies on temperature variation influence over electrical conductivity are summarized in Table 3. The overall conclusion was that the temperature increase leads to a linear increase in the electrical conductivity [24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38,39,40,41,42,43,44,45,46,47,48,49,50,51,52,53,54,55,56,57] which is a logical phenomenon with major occurrence in the physics of suspensions. Some details are already presented in both Table 1 and Section 3 and a discussion will be undertaken below.…”

“…Chereches and Minea [48] performed measurements of electrical conductivity of some simple and hybrid nanofluids based on water and different oxides (i.e., alumina, titania, silica) and few correlations were proposed based on volume fraction and temperature variation. For example:…”

Thermophysical profile of ethylene glycol based nanofluids containing two types of carbon black nanoparticles with different specific surface areas

“…13. For low mass fraction of nanoparticles in ethylene glycol, electrical conduction can increase by formation of electrical double layer (EDL) around nanoparticles [64]; for higher content of CB1, the conduction path can start to create.…”

Thermal Management and Modeling of Forced Convection and Entropy Generation in a Vented Cavity by Simultaneous Use of a Curved Porous Layer and Magnetic Field

“…A strong impact of the volume fraction was noted. In the experimental work of Chereches and Minea [ 30 ], electrical conductivity of hybrid nanofluids with water as base fluid and Al O , TiO and SiO as nanoparticles was examined for the temperature range of 20 °C and 60 °C. Several relations for the effective electrical conductivity of hybrid nanofluid were developed.…”