Simulation of Nanofluids by the Use of Commercial Process Simulators

Fluids are essential for heat transfer in many engineering equipments. Although various techniques are applied to enhance the heat transfer, the low heat transfer performance of these conventional fluids obstructs the performance enhancement and the compactness of heat exchangers. The use of solid particles as an additive suspended into the base fluid is a technique for the heat transfer enhancement. The enhancement of thermal conductivity of conventional fluids by the suspension of solid particles, such as millimeter- or micrometer-sized particles, has been well known for more than 100 years. However, they have not been of interest for practical applications due to problems such as sedimentation, erosion, fouling and increased pressure drop of the flow channel. The recent advance in materials technology has made it possible to produce nanometer-sizes particles that can overcome these problems. Innovative heat transfer fluids suspended by nanometer-sized solid particles are called ‘nanofluids’. This suspended nanoparticles can change the transport and thermal properties of the base fluid [1-2]. Despite the different studies done on nanofluids, their performance on the real conditions of equipments has not yet been cleared. So in the present work the effect of nanoparticle size and concentration on the performance of a Shell & Tube heat exchanger has been investigated by the use of a commercial process simulator.These simulators include a variety of highly efficient rigorous thermodynamic models and design models that allow the process engineer to evaluate different flowsheets and modeling options in an easy way. It means that taking into account the black-box model concept, the use of simulators can help to ease the formulation of the problem. In the next section the computational model has been described, while the results section presents the effects of nanofluids in the thermal performance of heat exchangers