EFFECT OF NANOFLUIDS AND MASS FLOW RATE OF AIR ON HEAT TRANSFER RATE IN AUTOMOBILE RADIATOR BY CFD ANALYSIS

J.R. Patel, A.M. Mavani

Abstract: Air has the largest influence on the overall heat transfer rate of automobile radiator. It is generally known that the velocity of the airflow through the radiator is a function of the vehicle speed and the “heat transferred by a radiator is a function of the airflow rate across the radiator” This paper presents a Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) modeling simulation of mass flow rate of air passing across the tubes and coolants in to the tubes of an automotive radiator. An introduction to Nanofluids is termed as the next generation heat transfer elements. The mass concentration of nano particles is proportional to the rate of heat transfer within critical limit. Air flow and coolants simulation is conducted using commercial software STAR CCM+. The CFD process starts with defining the water type geometric clean up and meshing using the Hyper mesh V11.0 software and then it is followed by the meshing which create the surface mesh as well as volume mesh accordingly. After meshing, the boundary conditions are defining before solving that represents flow fields of the simulation. The flow characteristics are then analyzed, compared and verified according to known physical situation and existing experimental data.

Keywords: Radiator, Modeling, simulation, Heat transfer, Nanofluids, CFD

DOI: https://doi.org/10.15623/ijret.2014.0306004