Nanofluid flow and heat transfer in an enclosure

Control of heat transfer in many energy systems is crucial due to the increase in energy prices. In recent years nanofluid technology has been proposed and experimentally or numerically studied by some researchers to control heat transfer in a process. There are two models for simulating nanofluid flow and heat transfer: single phase and two phase. In the single-phase model, nanoparticles are in thermal equilibrium and there are no slip velocities between the nanoparticles and fluid molecules; thus they have a uniform mixture of nanoparticles. In the two-phase model the nanoparticles cannot accompany fluid molecules because of some slip mechanisms such as Brownian motion and thermophoresis, so the volume fraction of nanofluid may no longer be uniform and there may be a variable concentration of nanoparticles in a mixture. In this chapter the governing equations of these models are presented and solved via the control volume finite element method.