Experimental investigation on thermal properties of Ag nanowire nanofluids at low concentrations

New nanofluids containing Ag nanowires with different concentrations were prepared by chemical reduction method. The metallic nanowires were monodispersed and soluble in distilled water. Thermal properties of nanofluids containing Ag nanowires were obtained using photothermal techniques. The thermal-wave resonator cavity (TWRC) technique was used to obtain the samples’ thermal diffusivity. Open Photoacoustic Cell (OPC) technique was used to obtain the thermal effusivity of Ag nanowires. The thermal diffusivity and effusivity were obtained by fitting the theoretical expressions for each configuration as a function of the sample thickness and frequency to the experimental data. The thermal properties of the nanofluids seems to be strongly dependent of Ag nanowire concentration. It was observed an increase of thermal parameters when concentration of nanowires increased. Thermal conductivity behavior of the nanofluids is explained. UV–vis spectroscopy, Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM), Energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDS) and X-ray diffraction (XRD) techniques were used to characterize the nanofluids.