Thermal conductivity of fullerene and TiO2 nanofluids

The term “nanofluids” was first proposed by researchers at Argonne National Laboratory and refers to a two-phase mixture, composed of a liquid medium and solid nanoparticles in suspension. One method of enhancing the thermal conductivity of a fluid is to add nanoparticles to the fluid, thus creating such a nanofluid. In this study, fullerene and titania nanoparticles were dispersed into mineral oil in order to investigate the effect on the thermal conductivity of the host fluid. The thermal conductivity of nanofluids was measured by means of the hot-wire method. A model was devised to calculate the thermal conductivity in mineral oil based nanofluids and then calculated with the help of COMSOL Multiphysics and compared to measurement results.