Heat Transfer and Fluid Flow Optimization of Titanium Dioxide–Water Nanofluids in a Turbulent Flow Regime

Abstract

In this study, the convection heat transfer and pressure drop of titanium dioxide–water nanofluids were modeled by applying the fuzzy C-means adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system approach for a completely developed turbulent flow based on experimentally obtained training and test datasets. Two models were proposed based on the effective parameters; one model was developed for the Nusselt number considering the effects of the Reynolds number, Prandtl number, nanofluid volume concentration and average nanoparticle diameter. Another model was suggested for the pressure drop of the nanofluid as a function of the Reynolds number, nanofluid volume concentration, and average nanoparticle diameter. The results of these two proposed models were compared with experimental data as well as the existing correlations in the literature. The validity of the proposed models was benchmarked by statistical criteria. Moreover, a modified non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm multiobjective optimization technique was applied to obtain the optimum design points, and the final result was shown in a Pareto front.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mehdi Mehrabi

Mehdi Mehrabi obtained his B.Eng. in Mechanical Engineering (Heat and Fluid Flow) in 2006 and his M.Eng. in Mechanical Engineering (Energy Conversion) in 2011, both from Urmia University, and Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Pretoria in 2015. He joined the Department of Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering at the University of Pretoria as a Senior Lecturer in 2017. He is a member of the Clean Energy Research Group and his research interests include, convection heat transfer, multi-objective optimization techniques, application of artificial intelligence techniques for modeling heat transfer processes, and thermophysical properties of nanofluids.

Seyyed Mohammad Ali Noori Rahim Abadi

Seyyed Mohammad Ali Noori Rahim Abadi received his B. Eng. in 2007 from Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, his M. Eng. in 2009 from University of Tehran, and his Ph.D. in 2015 from Guilan University, all in Mechanical Engineering. After receiving his Ph.D., he joined the Clean Energy Research Group of the University of Pretoria as a postdoctoral fellow. His research interests encompass multiphase flows, heat and mass transfer, and thermodynamics.

Josua Petrus Meyer

Josua P. Meyer is a Professor and the Head of the Department of Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering and Chair of the School of Engineering at the University of Pretoria. His research field is convective heat transfer in which he has published more than 600 scholarly articles, conference papers and book chapters. He has received various international awards for his research. According to the Essential Science Indicators of the ISI Web of Knowledge he is ranked amongst the top 1% of the world in engineering in all the three evaluation fields of citations, number of papers and citations per paper. He is/was the editor, lead editor, and associate editor of various prominent international heat transfer journals.