A comprehensive review of recent progress of nanofluid in engineering application: Microchannel heat sink (MCHS)

Abstract

Nanofluid is a new class of heat transfer fluid that is introduced to enhance the heat transfer performance in various heat exchanging systems. Prior to invention of nanofluid, water is the most common fluid used to extract heat generated from the systems. The application of water has reached thermal bottleneck since it can only enhance the heat transfer performance up to a certain extent. The suspension of nanoparticles with enhanced thermal conductivity provides augmentation in heat transfer performance. Since then, nanofluids have received great interest from scientists and researchers due to significant higher thermal conductivity. Due to enhanced thermophysical properties, nanofluids can be incorporated into high heat transfer device such as solar thermal conversion system, heat exchanger, and electronic equipment. Understanding the factors that influence the heat transfer performance is extremely important for appropriate selection and implementation of nanofluids. The influence of nanoparticles material, nanoparticles size, nanoparticles concentration, nanoparticles shape and surfactant are reviewed systematically to provide a comprehensive understanding of nanofluids. The review aims to extensively discuss the application of nanofluids in engineering application such as microchannel heat sink (MCHS). Finally, the review aims to update the readers about the current progress of nanofluids along with challenges of nanofluids in engineering field. The energy crisis issues have been debated over the century, and the primary objective is to achieve continuous and uninterrupted energy sources. The current global energy sources are dominated by traditional non-renewable sources, while renewable sources only accounts for small share. According to Centre for Climate and Energy Solutions, in the year of 2020, about 29% of the world electricity generation was from renewable energy [1]. From this, the energy management has arrived into two distinct approaches, either to conserve the conventional energy resources or to reduce the dependency on conventional energy resources and develop more efficient system to harvest renewable energy. The former approach has received considerable attention from scientists and researchers, which lead to development of energy efficient systems to reduce the energy usage.