Experimental optimization of the performance of a plate heat exchanger with Graphene oxide/water and Al₂O₃/water nanofluids

Abstract

The heating and cooling process is a major industrial challenge. The efforts to improve the design of heat transfer improvement mainly center around expanding the heat transfer area (through the geometry of the heat exchanger) and inducing turbulence to eliminate the boundary layer. A solution to increase the thermal efficiency of the heat exchanger and reduce costs is the use of materials such as nanofluids with ideal thermal and thermophysical properties. Here, to enhance the effectiveness of nanofluids and prevent sedimentation, atomic stabilization was the main focus by combining surfactants with nanofluids at specific weight concentrations and applying ultrasonic vibrations to increase stability. In this paper, the influence of using Graphene oxide (GO)/water and AL2O3/waternanofluids and the GO–AL2O3 /water hybrid nanofluid was investigated at 0.01 %, 0.02 %, 0.03 % wt concentrations. The effect on heat transfer and thermal efficiency of a plate heat exchanger relative to the base fluid (water) was examined. The nanofluids were stabilized in several stages to optimize the thermodynamic properties of the base fluid. The thermal efficiency of the nanofluids (η) reaches to its maximum at the highest weight concentration (0.03 %) with GO nanoparticles at 37 %, AL2O3 at 21 %, and the GO–AL2O3 hybrid at 26 %. GO nanoparticles had the most significant impact on the heat exchanger performance, with an optimized heat exchanger performance of 15.94 %, followed by the hybrid at 11.86 %, and AL2O3 at 7.4 %.

Keywords

• Plate heat exchanger
• GO
• Al₂O₃
• Thermal efficiency
• Pressure drop