Keynote Talk – Novel convective heat transfer enhancement in channels and tubes filled with nanofluid-saturated metal foams

A local thermal non-equilibrium theory was exploited to investigate heat transfer in nanofluid saturated porous media, in view of possible heat transfer applications of metal foams filled with nanofluids as high performance heat exchangers. The resulting set of the macroscopic equations based on the modified Buongiorno model proposed by Yan et al. for convective heat transfer in nanofluids were used to obtain the analytical solutions for laminar fully developed forced convection in channels and tubes filled with nanofluid saturated metal foams. The analytical and numerical solutions were obtained for laminar fully developed forced convection in channels and tubes filled with nanofluid saturated metal foams. These solutions reveal that combination of the metal foams and nanofluids is quite effective to attain unconventionally high heat transfer performance, namely, 80 to 100 times more than the case of base fluid convection without a metal foam and thus can be used for next generation high performance heat exchangers