Because of their superb thermal conductivity, nanofluids are seen as new generation of cooling mediums in many engineering applications. It is well established that even a small amount of nanoparticles mixed with a base fluid may result in distinct thermal conductivity enhancement. On the other hand, addition of nanoparticles to the base fluid results in its substantial viscosity increase. Therefore, it is very dicult to evaluate...

This paper deals with natural convection around a circular cylinder with constant heat flux in a cavity using computational fluid dynamics. As fluids ethylene glycol and a mixture of ethylene glycol with Al2O3 nanoparticles (mass concentrations of nanoparticles: 0.1% and 1%) are chosen. Rayleigh number ranges from 3104 to 3105. The nanofluids are modeled with single-phase approach. For the investigated range of nanoparticle concentration, the...

Nanofluids came to be seen as a new generation of coolants, both in single- and two phase systems. Furthermore, nanofluids or nanocomposites may be used as a media in a thermal energy storage (TES) in such systems as sensible heat storage (SHS) and phase change materials (PCM). In the SHS systems the dominating mechanism of the heat transfer is natural convection. However, in the literature only a few investigations of free convection...