ENHANCEMENT OF THE HEAT TRANSFER DUE TO THE LAMINAR FORCED CONVECTION OF A NANOFLUID IN A CHANNEL

A steady laminar forced convection in a parallel-plane channel using nanofluids is studied. The flow is assumed to be fully developed, and described through the Hagen-Poiseuille profile. A boundary temperature varying with the longitudinal coordinate in the thermal entrance region is prescribed. A study of the thermal behaviour of the nanofluid is performed by solving numerically the fully elliptic coupled equations. The numerical solution is obtained by Galerkin's finite element method implemented through the software package Comsol Multiphysics (Comsol, Inc.). The paper shows that, for physically interesting values of the Peclet number and for physically interesting boundary conditions, the concentration field depends very weakly on the temperature distribution.