Development of simple-to-use predictive models to determine thermal properties of Fe2O3/water-ethylene glycol nanofluid

Abstract

Thermophysical properties of nanofluids play a key role in their heat transfer capability and can be significantly affected by several factors, such as temperature and concentration of nanoparticles. Developing practical and simple-to-use predictive models to accurately determine these properties can be advantageous when numerous dependent variables are involved in controlling the thermal behavior of nanofluids. Artificial neural networks are reliable approaches which recently have gained increasing prominence and are widely used in different applications for predicting and modeling various systems. In the present study, two novel approaches, Genetic Algorithm-Least Square Support Vector Machine (GA-LSSVM) and Particle Swarm Optimization- artificial neural networks (PSO-ANN), are applied to model the thermal conductivity and dynamic viscosity of Fe2O3/EG-water by considering concentration, temperature, and the mass ratio of EG/water as the input variables. Obtained results from the models indicate that GA-LSSVM approach is more accurate in predicting the thermophysical properties. The maximum relative deviation by applying GA-LSSVM was found to be approximately +/- 5% for the thermal conductivity and dynamic viscosity of the nanofluid. In addition, it was observed that the mass ratio of EG/water has the most significant impact on these properties.