Effects of surfactant and nanofluid on the performance and optimization of a microchannel heat sink

Abstract

This paper reports the influence of surfactant Triton X-100 on boron nitride nanotubes (BNNTs) nanofluid in non-optimized and optimized microchannel heat sink (MCHS) at 30 °C and 50 °C. The MCHS performance was evaluated in terms of thermal resistance and pressure drop, utilizing experimental thermophysical properties of distilled water, a mixture of distilled water and surfactant Triton X-100 as base fluid, and nanofluid BNNTs at weight concentration of 0.001% into MCHS models which was further optimized with the Multiple Objective Particle Swarm Optimization (MOPSO) technique. It is found that the surfactant at 30 °C improves the MCHS thermal capabilities without nanotubes by 0.8% even after optimizing the MCHS according to the fluid properties. Conversely, surfactant Triton X-100 reduces pressure drop greatly with any change in thermal resistance at 50 °C and paired cooperatively with BNNTs nanofluid 0.001wt.% - mitigating pressure drop increment caused by the nanofluid resulting an overall performance improvement by 1.25% and 1.97% for thermal resistance and pressure drop respectively in MCHS systems and reduced to 1.3% and 3.2% after optimization. Optimized MCHS dimensions given by MOPSO could be manufactured and additionally gave wider solutions for large reduction of pressure drop up to 80% for economic MCHS with a drawback of higher thermal resistance.