Natural Convection of Al2O3 Nanofluid Between Two Horizontal Cylinders Inside a Circular Enclosure

Natural convection heat transfer within horizontal annuli has many engineering applications such as heat exchangers like fire tube heaters. In this paper numerical methods were used for the computational analysis of heat transfer from the fire tube/hot tube to the gas tube/cold tube inside the water medium using alumina nanoparticles. Because of eccentricities of both hot and cold cylinders and different diameters, the geometry is asymmetric. The mathematical model is based on two-dimensional continuity, momentum, energy, and volume fraction equations, which are solved numerically. The simulation was done for different values of particle loading, 1%, 2%, and 5%, at Rayleigh numbers 10³, 10⁴, and 10⁵. The results show that nanoparticles enhance the heat transfer by increasing the volume concentrations of particles. It was observed that the maximum and minimum augmentation of the average Nusselt number are about 30% and 14% at the Ra = 10³ and Ra = 10⁵, respectively. Although the average Nusselt number rises by increasing the Rayleigh number, the ratio of heat transfer using nanofluid to that by pure fluid decreases. Using 5% volume fraction of alumina nanoparticles at Rayleigh number of 10³ increases the heat transfer to cold tube by about 23% compared to the pure water. The effect of nanolayer formation around particles was considered in a thermal conductivity model, which shows approximately 5% increase in the Nusselt number. To verify the solution results, comparisons with previously published work on the basis of special cases are performed.