Effect of Saw Type Corrugated Pipe on Laminar Convective Heat Transfer by Using SiC-Water Nanofluids: A Numerical Study

Abstract

Enhancing the rate of heat transfer is highly required to remove excessive load of heat from heat transfer apparatus which may cause huge damage for the equipment. Thus increment of heat transfer area is one of the prime solutions for this issue. The heat transfer area can be increased by increasing the pipe wall and incorporating nanoparticles with working fluids. Because, nanoparticles showed much faster heat dispersion due to very large surface area for heat transfer and increase the thermal conductivity. Also, small size molecules of nanoparticles are allowed for free movement and thus micro convection, which promotes high thermal conductivity.  Higher thermal conductivity is mainly the result of higher heat transfer rate. Therefore, in this study, a saw type corrugated tube was considered along with the SiC-water nanofluid as the working fluid, to determine the improvement of laminar convective heat transfer in terms of the Nusselt number and heat transfer coefficient. The result demonstrated that by increasing the Reynolds number, the Nusselt number and heat transfer coefficient were increased significantly with the SiC concentration. In case of SiC-water nanofluid, at a Reynolds number of 1200, the maximum increment of Nusselt number in comparison to the base fluid was 9.15% when corrugated pipe was considered. Meanwhile, the maximum improvement of heat transfer coefficient for SiC-water nanofluid in comparison to the base fluid was 37.66%. Hence, this study clearly revealed that corrugated channel combined with nanofluid can provide enhancement of heat transfer rate and Nusselt for laminar developed region of the pipe.