A nanofluid is a fluid containing nanometer-sized particles, called nanoparticles. These fluids are engineered colloidal suspensions of nanoparticles in a base fluid. The nanoparticles used in nanofluids are typically made of metals, oxides, carbides, or carbon nanotubes. Common base fluids include water, ethylene glycol and oil.
Nanofluids have novel properties that make them potentially useful in many applications in heat transfer, including microelectronics, fuel cells, pharmaceutical processes, and hybrid-powered engines, engine cooling/vehicle thermal management, domestic refrigerator, chiller, heat exchanger, in grinding, machining and in boiler flue gas temperature reduction. They exhibit enhanced thermal conductivity and the convective heat transfer coefficient compared to the base fluid. Knowledge of the rheological behaviour of nanofluids is found to be critical in deciding their suitability for convective heat transfer applications.
Nanofluids also have special acoustical properties and in ultrasonic fields display additional shear-wave reconversion of an incident compressional wave; the effect becomes more pronounced as concentration increases.
In analysis such as computational fluid dynamics (CFD), nanofluids can be assumed to be single phase fluids; however, almost all new academic papers use a two-phase assumption. Classical theory of single phase fluids can be applied, where physical properties of nanofluid is taken as a function of properties of both constituents and their concentrations. An alternative approach simulates nanofluids using a two-component model.
The spreading of a nanofluid droplet is enhanced by the solid-like ordering structure of nanoparticles assembled near the contact line by diffusion, which gives rise to a structural disjoining pressure in the vicinity of the contact line. However, such enhancement is not observed for small droplets with diameter of nanometer scale, because the wetting time scale is much smaller than the diffusion time scale.