DESIGN OF A STEADY-STATE, PARALLEL-PLATE THERMAL CONDUCTIVITY APPARATUS FOR NANOFLUIDS AND COMPARATIVE MEASUREMENTS WITH TRANSIENT HWTC APPARATUS

A steady-state, parallel-plate thermal conductivity (PPTC) apparatus has been developed and used for comparative measurements of complex POLY-nanofluids, in order to compare results with the corresponding measurements using the transient, hot-wire thermal conductivity (HWTC) apparatus. The related measurements in the literature, mostly with HWTC method, have been inconsistent and with measured thermal conductivities far beyond prediction using the well-known mixture theory. The objective was to check out if existing and well-established HWTC method might have some unknown issues while measuring TC of complex nano-mixture suspensions, like electro-magnetic phenomena, undetectable hot-wire vibrations, and others. These initial and limited measurements have shown considerable difference between the two methods, where the TC enhancements measured with PPTC apparatus were about three times smaller than with HWTC apparatus, the former data being much closer to the mixture theory prediction. However, the influence of measurement method is not conclusive since it has been observed that the complex nano-mixture suspensions were very unstable during the lengthy steady-state measurements as compared to rather quick transient HWTC method. The nanofluid suspension instability might be the main reason for very inconsistent results in the literature. It is necessary to expend investigation with more stable nano-mixture suspensions.