Comparison between Single-Phase, Two-Phase Mixture and Eulerian-Eulerian Models for the Simulation of Jet Impingement of Nanofluids

This paper deals with heat transfer in jet impingement of nanofluids. Attention is focused to compare single-phase and two-phase nanofluid models and to study separate behaviors of the base fluid and the nanoparticles through the Eulerian-Eulerian two-phase model. For this purpose, jet impingement of Al2O3/water nanofluid in different conditions is simulated adopting the single-phase, two-phase mixture and Eulerian-Eulerian models and the corresponding results are discussed. For the solution of the governing equations of the three models, the control-volume approach is used. The accuracy of the current simulations is demonstrated by comparing the obtained results with those of open literature. The results indicate that in all of the approaches, increase in the Reynolds number as well as nanoparticle fraction leads to heat transfer improvement. During the current computations, the two-phase models predict higher heat transfer as compared to the single-phase model. Closer scrutiny of the two-phase approaches indicates that heat transfer of the Eulerian-Eulerian model is higher than the mixture model. However, it is found that with increase in the Reynolds number and decrease in the nanoparticle fraction, results of the two approaches become closer. Finally, the Eulerian-Eulerian model demonstrates that temperature distribution in the base fluid and the nanoparticles are similar but the corresponding velocity distributions are distinct.