Computational analysis of water-based copper oxide nanofluid properties and performance in a double-pipe small-scale heat exchanger

This paper models the thermal transport properties and performance of a water-based CuO nanofluid (with varying volume fractions of CuO) in a laboratory-sized double pipe heat exchanger (DPHE). Copper oxide (CuO) nanoparticles were used and their quantity was varied from a volume fraction of 0% to 0.1% with an incremental step size of 0.025%. The mass flow rates of the hot and cold fluids were maintained at 0.87 kg/s and 0.9 kg/s, respectively. Simulation results revealed that temperatures of 410 and 306.75 K, respectively, were attained at the hot and cold fluid outlets. Analysis of the DPHE showed that for cold fluids, thermophysical properties such as viscosity, thermal conductivity, specific heat capacity (SHC) and density were enhanced by the addition of nanoparticles. The temperature distribution, effectiveness and the heat transfer in the DPHE were observed to linearly increase with increment increases of the nanoparticle volume fraction.