An investigation on the fluid properties of spray cooling

• Main Author: Suwito, Joshua Vincent
• Other Authors: Wong Teck Neng
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2015
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Mechanical engineering
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/62080
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

In this world, heat is indispensable toward people’s lives. Heat can neither be destroyed nor created. The only way to vanish heat is by transferring it to cooler place. Overheating has caused problems for many types of machineries. There are many ways to enhance heat transfer. Increasing the surface area and changing the fluid properties are the most common ways to enhance heat transfer. In this project, the student was trying to enhance heat transfer by trying different kinds of fluids. At first, as a benchmark, DI Water was used as the fluid for spray cooling. Then 1-Butanol mixture with DI Water and Tween-20 mixture with DI Water were used. For measuring the heat transfer performance of each fluid, while the fluid was sprayed onto the copper plate, thermocouples were already set into the holes of the copper plate to measure the temperature. After some experiments, it was found out that 1-Butanol mixture and Tween-20 mixture can enhance the heat transfer. 1-Butanol and Tween-20 each can affect the property of DI Water which can affect in increasing the heat flux transferred from the copper plate. 1-Butanol mixture can increase the heat transfer around 7-8% while Tween-20 can increase around 5-6% compared to DI Water. Therefore, it is understood that 1-Butanol and Tween-20 can increase the heat transfer performance in spray cooling.