Experimental Investigation of Convective Heat Transfer of Ferro-Nanofluid Containing Graphene in a Circular Tube under Magnetic Field

Today, nanofluid is attracting intense research due to its potential to augment the heat transfer rate and the cooling rate in many systems. On the other hand, new research progresses indicate that graphene nanofluids even in very low concentrations could provide higher convective heat transfer coefficient in comparison to the conventional nanofluids. For this reason, we used nanofluid containing the CoFe2O4/GO nanoparticles as working fluid to perform experimental investigation of its effect on laminar forced convective heat transfer in the flow passing through a copper tube, which is under a uniform heat flux. It should be noted that utilizing magnetic field on nanoparticles is one of the active methods for improving the heat transfer rate. To achieve this objective, the effect of external magnetic field intensity and also the effect of applying different frequencies on the improvement of heat transfer in Reynolds number and different concentration is also investigated and the optimum frequency were obtained. The results showed that the heat transfer of the studied hybrid nanofluid has been improved in the presence of constant and alternating magnetic fields and the amount of heat transfer increment, due to an alternating magnetic field, is more significant compared with a constant magnetic field. The results also show that in the absence of magnetic field, using ferrofluid with concentration of φ=0.6%, improves the average enhancement in convective heat transfer up to 15.2% relative to the DI-water at Re=571, while this value is increased up to 19.7% and 31% by using constant and alternating magnetic field, respectively.