Heat and Mass Transfer Research Journal (HMTRJ)

Research Article

Influence of the Base Liquid and Particle Size on the Thermo-Physical Characteristics of MoS₂ Micro- and Nanofluids

Nader Nikkam¹, Joydeep Dutta², Mohammed Al-Abri³, Myo Tay Zar Myint⁴ and Muhammet S. Toprak²

¹Faculty of Life Sciences and Biotechnology, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran 19839, Iran.

²Department of Applied Physics, KTH-Royal Institute of Technology, SE106 91 Stockholm, Sweden.

³Water Research Center, Sultan Qaboos University, Muscat, Oman.

⁴Department of Physics, College of Science, Sultan Qaboos University, Muscat Oman.

Submitted: September 19, 2019; Revised: November 21, 2019; Accepted: December 3, 2019

Abstract

The present work investigates the formulation and evaluation of thermo-physical properties of water (W) and water/ethylene glycol (W/EG) based nanofluids and microfluids (NFs/MFs) made with the dispersion of Molybdenum(IV) sulfide nanoparticles and microparticles (MoS₂NPs/MPs) with focus on the effect of the particle size and the base liquid. A series of stable NFs and MFs with particle concentrations 0.25, 0.5 and 1wt% were prepared by dispersing MoS₂NPs and MPs in W and W/EG as the base liquids. Thermal conductivity (TC) and viscosity of MoS₂NFs and MFs, as the most important thermo-physical properties influencing the performance of heat exchange fluids, were measured at 20 oC. The results for TC and viscosity of W based MoS₂NF-MFs were compared with the same NFs-MFs with W/EG base liquid to reveal the impact of the base liquid. The experiments showed that W/EG based NFs-MFs exhibit higher heat transfer efficiencies than that of W-based suspensions. Moreover, NFs with MoS₂NPs exhibited higher TC than those of MFs containing the same particle concentration and at the same temperature, which helps to identify the effect of NP size. The best result was obtained for water-based NF with 1wt% MoS₂NP, demonstrating a TC enhancement of ~12.4 % with ~10.6 % viscosity increase at 20 oC.

Keywords

Heat transfer; Nanofluids; MoS₂; Nanoparticles; Microparticles; Thermal conductivity; Viscosity

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