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School of Engineering and Materials Science, Queen Mary University of London, London, UK
School of Aeronautical Science and Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing, P.R China
a r t i c l e i n f o
a b s t r a c t
Article history:
Received 7 March 2010
Received in revised form
27 October 2010
Accepted 27 October 2010
Available online 3 December 2010
This work reports a comparative study of nucleate boiling heat transfer with aqueous alumina nanouids
on two specially designed surfaces. The detailed surface characterization before and after boiling reveals
that the modication of heating surface geometries is mainly responsible for many contradictory results
reported in literature. The enhancement or deterioration of boiling heat transfer by nanouids is
dependent upon different surface modications that strongly affected by the relative size between
particles suspended in the liquid and the heating surface geometry, and their interactions. The surface
modication by nanoparticles is an inherent feature of nanouids, and would occur each time after boiling.
The experimental results would be affected by the number and frequency of the usage of boiling surfaces.
2010 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.
Keywords:
Nanoparticles
Nanouids
Boiling
Wetting
Surface property
1. Introduction
Nanouids are functional liquid suspensions containing particles that are smaller than 100 nm. With some enhanced properties,
they have wide potential application for intensifying heat and mass
transfer in a variety of systems. A considerable amount of effort has
been made to investigate the thermal behaviour of nanouids in
the last decade, such as effective thermal properties and their
applications under convective and boiling conditions. Though some
promising results are found for single phase convections, many
contradictive results are reported for boiling heat transfer with
nanouids. For instance when compared with boiling of pure uids,
signicant heat transfer enhancement was observed [1e5]; this
however contrasts signicantly to others where large heat transfer
deterioration was reported [6e9]. The results were very inconsistent even for the same nanoparticles under similar experimental
conditions. Not like the thermophysical properties such that the
thermal conductivity is always increased with particle concentrations, different trends have been extensively reported on the
inuence of particle concentrations on the boiling heat transfer
[10,11]. Meanwhile, a large number of studies reported different
levels of enhancement, from 10% to 400%, in the critical heat ux
(CHF) [10e14].
two carefully fabricated plate heaters with quantitative characterization of boiling surfaces before and after boiling through an
atomic force microscopy (AFM), energy dispersive X-ray spectrometry (EDS) and scanning electronic microscopy (SEM).
A particular focus is laid on the modication of surface properties
and their subsequent inuence on nucleate boiling heat transfer.
2. Experiment
To avoid the inuence of surfactants or dispersants, which alone
would have a strong effect on the boiling process [22,23], Al2O3
nanouids are made freshly by dispersing dried a-alumina nanopowers into de-ionized water under ultrasonic agitation conditions, the usual two-step method. Three low concentrations of
alumina nanouids are formulated, 0.001%, 0.01% and 0.1%
concentration by volume. The ultrasonication duration for each
concentration is 2 h just before the start of boiling experiments. The
nanouids formulated are not permanently stable but can last for
a couple of hours without visible sedimentations, which resembles
a large body of nanouids studies reported in literature
[5e7,12,17,20,21]. Fig. 1a shows a SEM image of the alumina
nanoparticles, where the primary particles are spherical and have
a wide size distribution in the range of 20e150 nm. Fig. 1b shows an
in-situ size distribution of alumina particles in the suspending
liquid measured by the dynamic light scattering method using
Malver nanosizer, the real particle size in a nanouid. It clearly
illustrates a much larger size prole than that of dried particles as
captured by SEM. The particle size lies within 50e900 nm with an
average diameter of 405 nm, a rst peak at 370 nm, and a second
peak at w5 micrometers. The second peak area accounts for w6% of
all light scattered and will be the rst batch of particles deposited
onto the surface that interacts with potential nucleate sites.
We emphasis here the large differences in particle size proles
between those observed by SEM and those suspended in a liquid
481
Fig. 1. Characterization of particles through SEM and in-situ particle prole measured
by nanosizers.
482
Table 1
AFM characterization of surfaces before and after boiling experiments.
Rough surface
Smooth surface
Before boiling
Amount of sampling
Max (nm)
Min (nm)
Peak-to-peak, Sy (nm)
Ten point height, Sz (nm)
Average (nm)
Average roughness, Sa
Root mean square, Sq (nm)
Surface skewness, Ssk
Coefcient of kurtosis, ka
65536
2923.37
0
2923.37
1461.75
1319
421.628
518.867
0.306605
0.341002
After boiling
65536
2868.94
0
2868.94
1436.11
1230.06
425.918
522.179
0.289994
0.323515
45675
3213.51
19.6829
3193.83
1615.64
1436.06
332.939
440.499
0.476305
1.27137
Before boiling
32032
3223.15
299.7
2923.45
1757.89
1425.77
507.007
593.402
0.664552
0.61836
65536
300.267
0
300.267
148.894
117.289
27.0047
34.3611
0.321084
0.570419
After boiling
65536
249.561
0
249.561
122.099
109.027
21.5897
27.3331
0.009188
0.234917
55430
960.579
0
960.579
489.613
540.218
58.3021
79.2264
0.68981
2.38402
45368
919.593
43.416
876.177
482.477
360.612
52.527
69.9111
0.403099
3.49667
483
Fig. 5. AFM image of the rough surface before and after boiling with nanouids.
484
Fig. 6. The scanning electron microscope image and chemical composition of a sample from the contaminated brass boiling plate (rough surface).
Fig. 7. The scanning electron microscope image and chemical composition of a sample from the contaminated Pyrex after boiling.
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