Stability and enhanced thermal conductivity of ethylene glycol-based SiC nanofluids

Nanofluid is one of the most popular fluids in recent scientific community, which exhibits more attractive heat transfer properties than the traditional thermal fluids. Nanofluids are fabricated by dispersing nanostructured solid particles in a selected base liquid. We recently reported on the rheological behavior of ethylene glycol (EG)-based nanofluids containing spherical-shaped silicon carbide (SiC) nanoparticles. In this study, we focused on the stability and thermo-physical property of EG/SiC nanofluids to investigate the enhanced thermal conductivity with respect to the effect of volume fraction and temperature. A series of SiC nanofluids with volume fraction up to 1.0 vol.% were made with this purpose. The results of sedimentation experiment and zeta potential analysis confirmed that the nanofluids exhibited good stability. In addition, enhancement up to 16.21% in thermal conductivity of nanofluids with volume fractions was found compared to base fluids and theoretical model. The thermal conductivity also increased with the measured temperature ranged from 20 to 50 degrees C. We do hope that our current work could be useful for future research of SiC nanofluids as sharing a desirable direction of nanofluids research. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.