Experimental investigation and fuzzy logic modelling of nanofluid solidification behavior

In this paper, the important characteristics of solidification including supercooling degree, solidification time, nucleation temperature, phase change temperature which affecting on efficiency are experimentally studied. A purposely designed experimental device was used to investigate the solidification characteristics of titania nanofluid (0.01%wt. 0.02% wt. and 0.04%wt.). The results evidently reveal that adding titania nanoparticles to Deionized water as a base fluid can reduce the time of solidification, phase change temperature and supercooling degree. By adding 0.04% wt. titania nanoparticles, the solidification time, phase change temperature and supercooling degree are reduced by 70%, 18%, 69% while nucleation temperature is enhanced by 29%. Thus, the time of solidification is more affected by adding nanoparticles than other solidification characteristics. Further, the experimental results show that nanofluid heat flux is higher than that of base fluid. Also a comparison of Fuzzy logic modelling and experimental results for liquid fraction is studied. The results reveal that the fuzzy logic modelling is a reliable and powerful technique for predicting the liquid transient fraction. From the results it is also concluded that extremely low concentration of titania have low average error.