A parametric study of subcooled flow boiling of Al₂O₃/water nanofluid using numerical simulation and artificial neural networks

Abstract

Utilizing an Euler-mixture three-dimensional numerical simulation for Al2O3/water nanofluid subcooled flow boiling in a mini channel, we study the effects of pressure, heat flux, nanoparticle concentration, surface roughness, and subcooled temperature on heat transfer quantities (average and local heat transfer coefficient, average and local vapor volume fraction, and average and local wall temperature) and bubble dynamics quantities (bubble departure diameter, bubble detachment frequency, bubble detachment waiting time, and nucleation site density). The numerical results demonstrate that the nanoparticles particularly impact the bubble dynamics significantly by increasing wettability and decreasing contact angle. In order to reduce the computational burden of such an expensive multiphase flow simulation, we also present a machine learning approach based on artificial neural networks (ANN). The numerical experiments show that using the ANN model, we can achieve highly accurate results with much less computational time and resources.