Estimation of the Thermal Conductivity of H2O-Cu Nanofluid from Molecular Dynamics Simulation

Abstract

Nanofluids are effective heat transfer medium possess remarkable thermal enhancement compared to their base fluids. The suspended nanoparticles significantly improve thermal compared to their base fluids. In this molecular dynamic simulation, the thermal conductivity of the H2O-Cunanofluid have been estimated for partial volume fractions in the range from 0.0031% to 0.0247% and temperature from 293 333 K at atmospheric pressure. The dispersed Cu-nanoparticles have spherical shape. This molecular dynamics results converge very well to the available experimental results.  The thermal conductivity of the H2O-Cu nanofluid achieved 33.3 % of enhancement over base fluid at a volume fraction 0.0125 and 66.6 % at PVF of 0.02478 %. The MD results showed that the addition Cu-nanoparticles to the H2O enhances strongly thermal conductivity as volume fraction increases. However, the effects of changing temperature on the thermal conductivity was very little. Our MD study showed that thermal conductivity of H2O-Cu Nanofluid is not influenced by temperature. The MD simulation results reveals a significant outcome of this study to better understand the mechanism of enhancing thermal transport property water when dispersing selected numbers of Cu-nanoparticle (at different particle volume fractions), and to mimic nanofluid behavior to better design more efficient nanofluid.