Enhancement of thermal conductivity of ethylene glycol based silver nanofluids

Nanofluid is a kind of new engineering material consisting of solid particles with size typically of 1–100 nm suspended in base fluids. Nanofluids offer excellent scope of enhancing thermal conductivity of common heat transfer fluids. In the present study, nanofluids are synthesized using silver nitrate (precursor), ethylene glycol (reducing agent), and poly(acrylamide-co-acrylicacid) (dispersion stabilizer). The different concentrations of silver nanofluid (1000–10,000 ppm) were synthesized. The silver particles present in colloidal phase have been characterized by EDX, XRD, UV–visible spectroscopy, Zeta potential and transmission electron microscopy (TEM). The stability as well as thermal conductivity of these nanofluids was determined with a transient hot-wire apparatus, as a lapse of time after preparation. Typically, 10,000 ppm silver nanofluid exhibited rapid increase in the particle size with the passage of time. Thermal conductivity of silver nanofluids increased to 10, 16, and 18% as the amount of silver particles in nanofluid were 1000, 5000, and 10,000 ppm, respectively. After 30 days of preparation, the thermal conductivity of 1000 and 5000 ppm silver nanofluids decreased slightly from 10% and 15% to 9% and 14%, respectively. In addition, the thermal conductivity of 10,000 ppm nanofluid was decreased from 18% to 14% after 30 days. It is very interesting to report that the silver particles were aggregated in early stage of preparation (up to 15 days), which leads to the increase in the size of silver particles. However, no significant change was observed after 15 days which indicates the stability of silver nanofluids.