Investigation On The Flow And Heat Transfer Of Liquid Metal And Liquid Metal Nanofluids

With the development of heat transfer and material application, it has been a trend that we need a kind of material with a good heat carrying ability. Liquid metal has a good heat transfer characteristic, so it has been a key point to this problem. However, the research, especially the investigation on flow and heat transfer characteristics of nanofluids is just at its outset and far from being understood.In view of the fact that the power of the nanotechnology and its many potential applications in the thermal science, the flow and heat transfer characteristics of nanofluids are numerically investigated under the forced convection and natural convection conditions with a commercial software using the single phase model, DPM model and E-E model in this thesis.Under the forced convective condition, the results show that the characteristic of liquid metal fluid is better than water in flow and heat transfer under the same condition. Moreover, the characteristic of liquid metal nanofluids is more better than liquid metal fluid in flow and heat transfer. At the same time using the single phase model, DPM model and E-E model, the results are a bit different.Under the natural convective condition, we obtained the flow field, vector field and temperature field in 2D and 3D models. Both results are almost identical. Therefore we can perform the simulation work using a 2D model instead of a 3D model. For the liquid metal nanofluid, it has a similar trend in the flow and heat transfer characteristic, but it can enhance the natural convective heat transfer under a special condition. With increasing the Gr number, the flow and heat transfer characteristics of the fluids change greatly from conduction to convection.