The Apparent Thermal Conductivity of Liquids Containing Solid Particles of Nanometer Dimensions: A Critique

There have been conflicting statements in the literature of the last twenty years about the behavior of the apparent thermal conductivity of two- or three-phase systems comprising solid particles with nanometer dimensions suspended in fluids. It has been a feature of much of the work that these multiphase systems have been treated as if a single-phase fluid and that the thermodynamic characteristics of the system have varied even though the systems have been given the same name. These so-called nanofluids have been the subject of a large number of investigations by a variety of different experimental techniques. In the current paper, we critically evaluate the studies of seven of the simplest particulate/fluid systems: Cu, CuO, \(\hbox {Al}_{2}\hbox {O}_{3}\), and \(\hbox {TiO}_{2}\) suspended in water and ethylene glycol. Our conclusion is that when results for exactly the same thermodynamic system are obtained with proven experimental techniques, the apparent thermal conductivity of the nanofluid exhibits no behavior that is unexpected and inconsistent with a simple model of conduction in stationary, multiphase systems. The wider variety of behavior that has been reported in the literature for these systems is therefore attributed to ill-characterization of the thermodynamic system and/or the application of experimental techniques of unproven validity.