Numerical investigation of laminar heat transfer of nanofluid-cooled mini-rectangular fin heat sinks

The single-and two-phase models in three-dimensional analysis are applied to study laminar convective heat transfer of nanofluids in a minichannel heat sink. The nanofluids with suspending TiO2 nanoparticles of average diameter 21 nm are prepared by ultrasound with a constant nanoparticle concentration of 0.4 vol.% without using surfactants. Experiments are carried out to verify the predicted results. It is shown that the results obtained from the two-phase model are more precise in comparison with the experimental results than those from the single-phase model. The predicted heat transfer coefficients for nanofluids are higher than those for water. © 2015 Springer Science+Business Media New York.