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Article history: A numerical solution is introduced to investigate the effect of laminar flow with a suspension of phase
Received 10 February 2012 change material nanoparticles (PCMs) in a microchannel. The nanoparticle suspension consisting of lauric
Received in revised form 20 June 2012 acid nanoparticles in water is introduced into a microchannel of 50 lm height and 35 mm length, where a
Accepted 9 October 2012
constant heat flux is applied to the bottom wall. Mass, momentum and energy equations are solved
Available online 3 November 2012
simultaneously using a fluid with effective thermo-physical properties. The effect of various parameters
including mass flow rate (1 105–4 105 kg/s), heat flux (8000–20,000 W/m2) and particle volume
Keywords:
concentrations (0–10%) on the thermal performance is investigated using effectiveness ratio, perfor-
Microchannel
Phase change material
mance index, and Merit number. The study is extended to include the optimum channel length for
Nanoparticles improved thermal performance. For a given particle concentration, an optimum heat flux to mass flow
Laminar flow rate ratio exists that leads to the maximum effectiveness ratio of 2.75, performance index of 1.37 and
Merit number of 0.64. Such a study facilitates understanding the parametric space to optimize heat trans-
fer in microchannels for applications such as thermal management and energy conversion devices.
Ó 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction 1999; Rao et al., 2007; Wang et al., 2007, 2008; Chen et al., 2008;
Zeng et al., 2009). More recently, interest in the thermal perfor-
The development of next generation microchips, microproces- mance of PCM slurries in microchannels have emerged for applica-
sors and other small scale high heat generating applications is tions in microchannel heat exchangers and cooling of electronic
constrained by the issue of effective heat removal (Sabbah et al., devices (Sabbah et al., 2008; Xing et al., 2005; Kondle et al., 2009;
2008). The cooling capacity required to reach switching speeds Kuravi et al., 2009, 2010). Sabbah et al. (2008) performed a three-
needed for next generation computing devices is of the order of dimensional numerical study on the performance of microchannel
105 W/cm3 which cannot be met by current liquid cooling systems heat sinks using micro-encapsulated PCMs and considered the ther-
including microchannel heat sinks (Xing et al., 2005). A promising mal resistance of the heat sink walls while incorporating tempera-
method to meet the electronic cooling demands for next generation ture dependent physical properties for the PCM slurry. Xing et al.
devices, by enhancing heat storage capacity of the heat transfer (2005) evaluated the performance of liquid flow with PCM particles
fluid, is to introduce PCM particles in the fluid. The phase change in circular microchannels. The conservation equations for the parti-
of the PCM particles in the fluid significantly enhances its heat stor- cle and liquid phase were solved separately while considering the
age capacity and thus increases its ability to absorb high heat fluxes. effects of particle–particle interaction and the particle depletion
Therefore, a quantitative assessment of the heat storage capacity boundary near the wall. A particular Reynolds number and wall
increase of the fluid in a microchannel flow with the presence of heat flux was found to achieve maximum heat transfer enhance-
particles becomes essential. In addition to the heat storage capacity ment with PCM particles. Kondle et al. (2009) numerically studied
increase, it is also necessary to determine the effect of particles on heat transfer characteristics of PCMs in a laminar flow for circular
the pressure drop and entropy generation inside the microchannel. and rectangular microchannels. The carrier fluid and particles were
Significant efforts have focused on using PCMs for improving the modeled using homogeneous model while a specific heat model
thermal performance of the carrier fluid in the past decade (Sabbah was used for the phase change of particles. Kuravi et al. (2009) used
et al., 2008; Xing et al., 2005; Kondle et al., 2009; Kuravi et al., 2009, a similar homogeneous model to study numerically the thermal
2010; Goel et al., 1994; Roy and Avanic, 1997; Yamagishi et al., performance of nano-encapsulated PCM slurry in microchannels.
The temperature and velocity fields were obtained in three dimen-
⇑ Corresponding author. Tel.: +966 3 8604481; fax: +966 3 860 5223. sional domain and the model included the microchannel fin effect
E-mail address: bsyilbas@kfupm.edu.sa (B.S. Yilbas). along with the longitudinal conduction along the microchannel
0142-727X/$ - see front matter Ó 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijheatfluidflow.2012.10.001
160 A.B.S. Alquaity et al. / International Journal of Heat and Fluid Flow 38 (2012) 159–167
Nomenclature
length. Kuravi et al. (2010) investigated the heat transfer perfor- 2. Model framework
mance of water-based microencapsulated PCM slurry in manifold
microchannels both experimentally and numerically. Their findings A schematic of the microchannel incorporated in the model
revealed that the slurry performance was poorer as compared to study is shown in Fig. 1. In this case, a microchannel of constant
single fluid. They also performed a parametric study with nano- height (50 lm, H) and length (35,000 lm, L) is defined in the FLU-
encapsulated PCM slurry flow. The results of the parametric study ENT™ simulations. For 3D simulations, width of the microchannel
showed that using narrower channels and PCM particles with is considered to be 2 mm, which is 40 times the microchannel
higher thermal conductivity improved the thermal performance height. The carrier fluid with nanosized particles is assumed to en-
of PCM slurry as compared to a single fluid. The laminar hydrody- ter into the microchannel at a temperature just below the melting
namic and heat transfer characteristics of suspension flow with temperature of the particles. A constant heat flux is applied at the
micro-nano-size phase-change material (PCM) particles in a micro- bottom wall, which heats the carrier fluid and particles. After tra-
channel were investigated by Hao and Tao (2006). They indicated versing a certain length of the microchannel, the particles undergo
that the heat transfer enhancement took place in wall region due phase change. The phase change of the particles plays an important
to the presence of PCM particles. Liquid–liquid two-phase flow in role in decreasing the temperature rise of the fluid as compared to
pore array microstructured devices for scaling-up of nanoparticle the case with no phase change particles in the flow system and
preparation was examined by Li et al. (2009). The findings revealed thereby increases the thermal storage capacity of the fluid.
that the particle size was decreased with the increase of the droplet In order to formulate the flow and heat transfer problem, the
size in both the drop flow region and the disk flow region whereas it following assumptions were made:
had a reverse trend in the transition region. Although significant
studies using homogeneous model have been performed in the The flow of the bulk fluid inside the microchannel is steady and
past, none of them have presented the entropy generation due to laminar.
the addition of PCM particles. For this purpose, we have defined The fluid is Newtonian up to particle volume concentrations of
the Merit number to incorporate the thermodynamic irreversibility 10% (Kuravi et al., 2009).
in the flow system. Moreover, in this paper, we have performed a The shell encapsulating nanoparticles will be thin, so its effect
comprehensive study of the influence of various parameters, has been neglected (Kuravi et al., 2009).
including mass flow rate, heat flux, and particle volume concentra- The particles and carrier fluid are assumed to have the same
tions, on the thermal performance of the slurry. We use water as the temperature and velocity in the microchannel (Kuravi et al.,
carrier fluid and lauric acid as the PCM particles with different vol- 2009).
ume concentrations ranging from 0% to 10% in the analysis. Homo- The distribution of particles inside the microchannel is homoge-
geneous model was used to simulate temperature and flow fields. neous (Kuravi et al., 2009).
The thermo-physical properties of the PCM particles are assumed The PCM particle melts instantaneously once the melting tem-
to be constant during the simulations and are given in Table 1. perature is reached (Kuravi et al., 2009).
The thermo-physical properties of carrier fluid are assumed to be
temperature dependent. 2.1. Homogeneous model
Fig. 1. Schematic of microchannel used in the FLUENT simulations where heat flux is applied to the bottom wall, and H is the microchannel height, L is the microchannel
length. The side walls are assumed to be adiabatic.
v Þ ¼ rp þ lb r2 v
v~
r ðqb~ ð2Þ
c þc L
c q p;S 2 p;L þ T þ ð1 cÞðqcp Þf
liquidus T solidus p
Energy equation: cpb ¼ ð8Þ
qb
v cpb TÞ ¼ r ðkb rTÞ
r ðqb~ ð3Þ For T P > T liquidus :
Table 2
Comparison between constant properties and temperature dependent properties.
2x
Due to the lack of comparable experimental data for PCM slurry xþ ¼ ð11Þ
Dh Reb Prb
flow in microchannels, the homogeneous model used in this study
is validated through comparing the predictions with the experi- where Reb is Reynolds number and Prb is the Prandtl number of the
mental data obtained for PCM slurry flow in a 3.14 mm diameter bulk fluid.
circular tube (Goel et al., 1994) and in a 4 mm diameter circular
tube (Wang et al., 2008). Fig. 2 shows the comparison of wall tem-
4. Results and discussion
perature for Stefan number of 3 predicted using homogeneous
model with the experimental data for 10% particle volume concen-
We investigated the effect of particle volume concentration,
tration. Stefan number is defined as the ratio of sensible heat
mass flow rate and heat flux on the thermal performance of bulk
capacity of the slurry to its latent heat capacity and is given as
fluid inside the microchannel. The effectiveness ratio (Xing et al.,
(Goel et al., 1994):
2005), performance index (Xing et al., 2005), and Merit number
cpb q00 Dh qb are used, where the heat flux applied to different volume concen-
Ste ¼ ð10Þ
2kb cLqp trations of PCM fluids is the same, while the heat flux applied to
water is varied to maintain the same temperature rise as that of
PCM fluid. This approach helps compare the heat transfer increase
in the PCM slurry for the same temperature rise as that of water.
Fig. 4 shows temperature contours along the channel length for
the case with no PCM particles and with 10% particle volume con-
centration. The temperature contours shown in the figures corre-
spond to the case of mass flow rate of 4 105 kg/s and heat flux
of 16,000 W/m2. It can be observed from the figures that increasing
the concentration of PCM particles contributes to temperature de-
crease in the channel towards the channel exit by 4.12 K (61%
reduction in temperature), which is attributed to the latent heat
of fusion associated with the phase change of the PCM particles.
Qb
eeffectiv eness ¼ ð12Þ
Qf
where
_ p;f DT f
Q f ¼ mc ð14Þ
For the same carrier fluid and bulk fluid mass flow rates, the
effectiveness ratio simply reduces to a ratio of their average
specific heats. Fig. 5 shows the variation of effectiveness ratio with
heat flux to mass flow rate ratio for different particle volume con-
centrations of PCM particles. Initially, the effectiveness ratio in-
creases with increasing heat flux to mass flow rate ratio of PCM
slurry and keeps increasing until it reaches a peak value. Further
Fig. 5. Variation of effectiveness ratio with ratio of heat flux to mass flow rate of
increase in heat flux to mass flow rate ratio decreases the effective-
PCM slurry, where VF 3, VF 5, VF 7 and VF 10 represents 3%, 5%, 7% and 10% volume
ness ratio. The heat flux to mass flow rate ratio required to reach concentration of the particles, respectively.
the peak effectiveness ratio value increases with increasing volume
concentration of particles. Moreover, for higher volume concentra-
tion of PCM particles, the peak value of effectiveness ratio is higher. tio, increase in heat flux is reflected in an increase in the value of
This trend in the effectiveness ratio can be explained as follows: effectiveness ratio. The effectiveness ratio keeps increasing with
For a given mass flow rate, the effectiveness ratio is the highest increasing heat flux to mass flow rate ratio until enough heat flux
when the ratio of latent heat to sensible heat of the bulk fluid in the is applied to complete the melting of PCM particles within the
microchannel is the largest. The maximum value of latent heat to length of the microchannel. The heat flux to mass flow rate ratio re-
sensible heat ratio occurs when the particles reach the liquidus quired for complete phase change of PCM particles is larger for
temperature (upper melting temperature) at the exit of the micro- higher volume concentration of particles in the carrier fluid. Further
channel. This ensures that sensible heating occurs only near the in- increase in heat flux to mass flow rate ratio leads to an increase in
let of the microchannel, and, thus, the latent heat ratio is the the sensible heating of PCM particles after their phase change, and
maximum. For low heat flux to mass flow rate ratio values, the thus the effectiveness ratio starts to reduce. Consequently, the
phase change of PCM particles is not complete due to the low value effectiveness ratio increases initially, reaches a peak value and,
of heat flux applied. Therefore, at low heat flux to mass flow rate ra- then, decreases for all volume concentration of PCM particles.
164 A.B.S. Alquaity et al. / International Journal of Heat and Fluid Flow 38 (2012) 159–167
" 2 # 2
2
kb @T @T lb @u
S000
gen ¼ 2 þ þ ð22Þ
T @x @y T @y
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