EXPERIMENTAL PREDICTION OF THERMAL CONDUCTIVITY OF ETHYLENE GLYCOL SILVER BASED NANOFLUID

This report discussed on the preparation and the characterization of the
nanofluids for the thermal characterization application. The purposes of this project
are to formulate a stable nanofluid, experimentally analyzed the thermal conductivity
of the nanofluids and derive equations from data collected. Scopes of study focused
in this report are the nanoparticles, base fluids, and the volume percentage of the
particles inside nanofluids. The nanoparticles selected for this project is silver
nanoparticles of different size which are 20nm and 50nm while the base fluids is
Ethylene Glycol. The nanofluids are prepared using two-step method whereby the
process of synthesizing the nanoparticles are separated from mixing with base fluids.
The nanofluids are formulated with different volume percentage of nanoparticles
which are 0.3%, 0.5% and 1.0%. The thermal conductivity of the nanofluids is
measured using KD2 Pro portable thermal analyzer. Result obtained shows that
presence of nanoparticles inside base fluids can enhance the thermal conductivity
compared to base fluids. The thermal conductivity of nanofluids is increasing with
the temperature and decreasing with the size of nanoparticles. Nanofluids with 50 nm
particles exhibit a better thermal conductivity compared to nanofluids with 20 nm
particles. Equations derived from the graph constructed from the data obtained can
be used to calculate the thermal conductivity of the nanofluids at different
temperature and volume concentrations.