Constructal blade shape in nanofluids

Abstract

Blade configuration of nanofluids has been proven to perform much better than dispersed configuration for some heat conduction systems. The analytical analysis and numerical calculation are made for the cylinder-shaped and regular-rectangular-prism-shaped building blocks of the blade-configured heat conduction systems (using nanofluids as the heat conduction media) to find the optimal cross-sectional shape for the nanoparticle blade under the same composing materials, composition ratio, volumetric heat generation rate, and total building block volume. The regular-triangular-prism-shaped blade has been proven to perform better than all the other three kinds of blades, namely, the regular-rectangular-prism-shaped blade, the regular-hexagonal-prism-shaped blade, and the cylinder-shaped blade. Thus, the regular-triangular-prism-shaped blade is selected as the optimally shaped blade for the two kinds of building blocks that are considered in this study. It is also proven that the constructal cylinder-regular-triangular-prism building block performs better than the constructal regular-rectangular-prism-regular-triangular-prism building block. © 2011 Bai and Wang.