Experimental investigation on the effect of SiO2 secondary phase on thermo-physical properties of SiC nanofluids

Nanofluids (NFs), wherein solid nanoparticles (NPs) are dispersed in traditional heat exchange fluids, are recognized for improving the performance of traditional fluids by enhancing their thermal conductivity (TC). The presence of impurities or undesired phases in commercial NPs may influence the thermo-physical properties of NFs including TC and viscosity, which makes it difficult to understand the real effect of NPs on heat transport characteristics of NFs. Moreover, the presence of these impurities in commercial NPs is unavoidable and their removal from commercial NPs with no negative impact on composition of NPs is challenging. To study the impact of impurities on thermo-physical properties of NFs a systematic experimental work was performed using commercial α-SiC and SiO₂ NPs as the secondary phase as it commonly co-exists in commercial SiC batches. For this purpose, a series of NFs containing 9 wt% of α-SiC/SiO₂ NP mixture with different content of SiO₂ NPs from 5 to 50% were fabricated and investigated. The results show that as the undesired impurity phase (SiO₂) increases, TC of NFs decreases slightly while viscosity increases dramatically. This may be a sound path to tuning the viscosity of the NFs while the achieved high TC is mildly influenced by the secondary phase.