Comparison between Experimental and Theoretical Thermal Conductivity of Nanofluids Containing Multi-walled Carbon Nanotubes Decorated with TiO₂ Nanoparticles

Abstract

This article reports the thermal conductivity modeling of nanofluids containing decorated multi-walled carbon nanotubes with TiO₂ nanoparticles. TiO₂ nanoparticles and decorated multi-walled carbon nanotubes are synthesized with different amounts of TiO₂ nanoparticles. The experimental results show that the measured thermal conductivities of TiO₂ nanofluids and multi-walled carbon nanotube nanofluids are higher than the predicted values by theoretical models. The comparison results of multi-walled carbon nanotube nanofluids and multi-walled carbon nanotube–TiO₂ nanofluids reveal that the predicted values by the Xue model are closer to the measured values. In addition, the results show that the thermal conductivity of nanofluids containing multi-walled carbon nanotube–TiO₂ increases with respect to TiO₂ content of hybrid.

Keywords::

• multi-walled carbon nanotube
• TiO₂ nanoparticles
• thermal conductivity
• nanofluid
• modeling

Acknowledgments

The authors gratefully acknowledge the help given by Mrs. Khakrah from Central Research Laboratory of Ferdowsi University of Mashhad and Mrs. T. Saeedi from Par-e-Tavous Research Institute.