A Design Study for Standard Nanofluid Coolants

The experimental data for nanofluids in thermal-fluid systems have shown that the new fluids promise to become advanced heat transfer fluids in terms of thermal performance. While enhancing thermal characteristics, the solid-liquid mixtures present an unavoidable disadvantage in terms of pumping cost for economic operation of thermal-fluid systems. In addition, there is a lack of agreement between experimental data provided in the literature. We can find that this issue of nanofluids resembles that of designing new materials. Many nanofluids researchers tend to view the nanofluid field as a highly coupled 'tetrahedro' whose four vertices (performance, properties, structure, and processes) are interconnected to each other. The present design study has a big merit to systemize the nanofluid work and to reduce a lot of trial-error efforts. The present work found that there would be no comprehensible design strategy in developing nanofluids. In this work, the Axiomatic Design (AD) theory is applied to standardize the design of nanofluids in order to bring its practical use forward. According to the Independence Axiom of the AD theory, the excessive couplings between the functional requirements and the parameters of a nanofluid system prevent from meeting the functional goals of the entire system. At a parametric level, the design of a nanofluid system is inherently coupled due to the characteristics of thermal-fluid system; the design parameters physically affect each other sharing sub-level parameters for nanoparticles with making a feedback loop. Even though parts of the nanofluids are naturally coupled, it is possible to reduce and/or eliminate the degree of coupling by help of AD principles. From the perspective of AD, this implies that we are able to ascertain which nanofluid system is better one in the light of functional achievement