Transient Heat Transfer Analysis of Freeze Plate Structures Cooled by Nanofluids

Abstract

Heat transfer enhancement by nanofluids is an emerging and innovative technology for traditional heat transfer problems. However, researches of nanofluids for refrigeration applications are rare either theoretically or experimentally. In this paper, the physical model of a freezing chucker is considered as a two-dimensional domain which is consist of the top and bottom copper plates, and a channel for flowing of copper nanofluids. Inlet flow passes through the left hand side and exhausts to the outlet at right hand side. Three kinds of transverse rib structures, e/Dh = 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, are attached on the internal top wall of the channel for heat transfer enhancement of the coolant flows. To investigate this problem, the transient heat transfer of this channel flow is analyzed and transport problems are solved numerically for the ethylene-glycol (EG) based nanofluids mixture of copper nano-particles with volume fractions of 0%, 0.5%, 1%, 5%, respectively. The smooth channel problem is analyzed and compared to the ribbed channel problem. Analyses of the highest decay rate, the lowest temperature, and temperature distributions of the top-plate surface of a freezing chucker are shown.