Experimental investigation of the flow and heat transfer of magnetic nanofluid in a vertical tube in the presence of magnetic quadrupole field

In this paper, the effects of applying magnetic field on hydrodynamics and heat transfer of Fe3O4/water magnetic nanofluid flowing inside a vertical tube have been studied experimentally. The applied magnetic field was resulted from quadrupole magnets located at different axial positions along the tube length. The variations of the local heat transfer coefficient and also the pressure drop of the ferrofluid flow along the length of the tube by applying the magnetic quadrupole field have been investigated for different Reynolds numbers. The obtained experimental results show maximum enhancements of 23.4%, 37.9% and 48.9% in the local heat transfer coefficient for the magnetic nanofluid with 2 vol% Fe3O4 in the presence of the quadrupole magnets located at three different axial installation positions for the Reynolds number of 580 and the relative increase in total pressure drop by applying the magnetic field is about 1% for Re = 580. The increase of the heat transfer coefficient is due to the radial magnetic force toward the heated wall generated by magnetic quadrupole field acting over the ferrofluid flowing inside the tube so that the velocity of the ferrofluid in the vicinity of the heated wall is increased. It is also observed that the enhancement of heat transfer coefficient by applying magnetic quadrupole is decreased with increasing the Reynolds number.