Abstract Nanofluids or liquids with suspended nanoparticles are likely to be the future heat transfer media, as they exhibit higher thermal conductivity than those of liquids. It has been proposed that nanoparticles are apt to congregate and form clusters, and hence the interaction between nanoparticles becomes important. In this paper, by taking into account the interaction between nearest-neighbour inclusions, we adopt the multiple image method to investigate the effective thermal conductivity of nanofluids. Numerical results show that then the thermal conductivity ratio between the nanoparticles and fluids is large, and the two nanoparticles are close up and even touch, and the point-dipole theory such as Maxwell--Garnett theory becomes rough as many-body interactions are neglected. Our theoretical results on the effective thermal conductivity of CuO/water and Al$_{2}$O$_{3}$/water nanofluids are in good agreement with experimental data.
Received: 06 July 2006
Revised: 21 August 2006
Accepted manuscript online:
Fund: Project supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China
(Grant No~10204017) and the Natural Science of Jiangsu
Province, China (Grant No~BK2002038).
Cite this article:
Zhou Xiao-Feng(周晓锋) and Gao Lei(高雷) Effect of multipolar interaction on the effective thermal conductivity of nanofluids 2007 Chinese Physics 16 2028
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