COMPARATIVE NUMERICAL STUDY OF SINGLE-PHASE AND TWO-PHASE MODELS FOR BIO-NANOFLUID TRANSPORT PHENOMENA

A computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation of laminar convection of Al2O3–water bio-nanofluids in a circular tube under constant wall temperature conditions was conducted, employing a single-phase model and three different two-phase models (volume of fluid (VOF), mixture and Eulerian). The steady-state, three-dimensional flow conservation equations were discretised using the finite volume method (FVM). Several parameters such as temperature, flow field, skin friction and heat transfer coefficient were computed. The computations showed that CFD predictions with the three different two-phase models are essentially the same. The CFD simulations also demonstrated that single-phase and two-phase models yield the same results for fluid flow but different results for thermal fields. The two-phase models, however, achieved better correlation with experimental measurements. The simulations further showed that heat transfer coefficient distinctly increases with increasing nanofluid particle concentration. The physical properties of the base fluid were considered to be temperature-dependent, while those of the solid particles were constant. Grid independence tests were also included. The simulations have applications in novel biomedical flow processing systems.