Overview of Hybrid Nanofluids Development and Benefits

Conventional fluids have poor heat transfer properties, but their vast applications in power generation, chemical processes, heating and cooling processes, electronics and other microsized applications make the reprocessing of those thermofluids to have better heat transfer properties quite essential. Recently, it has been shown that the addition of solid nanoparticles to various fluids can increase the thermal conductivity and can influence the viscosity of the suspensions by tens of percent. Thermophysical properties of nanofluids were shown dependent on the particle material, shape, size, concentration, the type of the base fluid, and other additives. In spite of some inconsistency in the reported results and insufficient understanding of the mechanism of the heat transfer in nanofluids, it has been emerged as a promising heat transfer fluid. In the continuation of nanofluids research, the researchers have also tried to use hybrid nanofluid recently, which is engineered by suspending dissimilar nanoparticles either in mixture or composite form. The idea of using hybrid nanofluids is to further improve the heat transfer and pressure drop characteristics by trade-off between advantages and disadvantages of individual suspension, attributed to good aspect ratio, better thermal network and synergistic effect of nanomaterials. As a conclusion, the hybrid nanofluids containing composite nanoparticles yield significant enhancement of thermal conductivity. However, the long-term stability, production process, selection of suitable nanomaterials combination to get synergistic effect and cost of nanofluids may be major challenges behind the practical applications.