Analysis of Nanofluids in Liquid Electronic Cooling Systems

Nanofluids are solutions of a small fraction of suspended nanoparticles in a bulk fluid. Nanofluids have shown great promise as heat transfer fluids over typically used bulk fluids and fluids with micron sized particles. The nanoparticles do not settle in the fluid and do not cause clogging or damage to surfaces as with micron sized particles. In the current work we compare the performance of different volume loadings of water-based alumina nanofluids in a commercially available electronics cooling system to that of pure DI-water. The commercially available system is a water block used for liquid cooling of a computational processing unit. The size of the nanoparticles in the study is varied from 20 nm to 30 nm. Results show an enhancement in convective heat transfer, but not in the temperature increase through a heated tube or commercial cooling system in nanofluids with volume loadings of nanoparticles up to 2% by volume. The current nanofluids showed significant settling within an hour of preparation.