PARAMETRIC STUDY ON TRANSIENT HOT-WIRE METHOD TO MEASURE NANOFLUID CONDUCTIVITIES

Abstract

Recently, nanofluid is a hot research topic among thermal engineers to enhance the heat transfer. However, there are deviations between research groups in the effective thermal conductivity measurements by the transient hot-wire method. Since there has been no report for the researchers to select a proper data range of temperature to estimate the thermal conductivities, the deviation could be partly attributed to the poor selection of the temperature data range. In this study, the impacts of the data range selection, the power supplier response delay, the thermal coefficient of resistors, the hot-wire type and test section size on the thermal conductivity measurement using the transient hot-wire method are analyzed. The proper selection of the temperature data range to be used to estimate the thermal conductivities of fluids using transient hot-wire method is suggested by investigating the impact of it on the measurement by both computationally and experimentally. The thermal coefficient of resistor is found to affect the measurement seriously whereas the type of hot-wire does not. The test section size of the measuring device is compared with the thermal penetration depth.