Solar energy is one of the best sources of renewable energy with minimal environmental impact. Direct absorption solar collectors have been proposed for a variety of applications such as water heating; however the efficiency of these collectors is limited by the absorption properties of the working fluid, which is very poor for typical fluids used in solar collectors. It has been shown that mixing nanoparticles in a liquid (nanofluid) has a dramatic effect on the liquid thermophysical properties such as thermal conductivity. Nanoparticles also offer the potential of improving the radiative properties of liquids, leading to an increase in the efficiency of direct absorption solar collectors. Here we report on the experimental results on solar collectors based on nanofluids made from a variety of nanoparticles (carbon nanotubes, graphite, and silver). We demonstrate efficiency improvements of up to 5% in solar thermal collectors by utilizing nanofluids as the absorption mechanism. In addition the experimental data were compared with a numerical model of a solar collector with direct absorption nanofluids. The experimental and numerical results demonstrate an initial rapid increase in efficiency with volume fraction, followed by a leveling off in efficiency as volume fraction continues to increase.

Nanofluids—a simple product of the emerging world of nanotechnology—are suspensions of nanoparticles (nominally 1–100 nm in size) in conventional base fluids such as water, oils, or glycols. Nanofluids have seen enormous growth in popularity since they were proposed by Choi in 1995. In the year 2011 alone, there were nearly 700 research articles where the term nanofluid was used in the title, showing rapid growth from 2006 (175) and 2001 (10). The first decade of nanofluid research was primarily focused on measuring and modeling fundamental thermophysical properties of nanofluids (thermal conductivity, density, viscosity, heat transfer coefficient). Recent research, however, explores the performance of nanofluids in a wide variety of other applications. Analyzing the available body of research to date, this article presents recent trends and future possibilities for nanofluids research and suggests which applications will see the most significant improvement from employing nanofluids.

It has been more than two decades since the discovery of nanofluids-mixtures of common liquids and solid nanoparticles less than 100 nm in size. As a type of colloidal suspension, nanofluids are typically employed as heat transfer fluids due to their favorable thermal and fluid properties. There have been numerous numerical studies of nanofluids in recent years (more than 1000 in both 2016 and 2017, based on Scopus statistics). Due to the small size and large numbers of nanoparticles that interact with the surrounding fluid in nanofluid flows, it has been a major challenge to capture both the macro-scale and the nano-scale effects of these systems without incurring extraordinarily high computational costs.To help understand the state of the art in modeling nanofluids and to discuss the challenges that remain in this field, the present article reviews the latest developments in modeling of nanofluid flows and heat transfer with an emphasis on 3D simulations. In part I, a brief overview of nanofluids (fabrication, applications, and their achievable thermo-physical properties) will be presented first.Next, various forces that exist in particulate flows such as drag, lift (Magnus and Saffman), Brownian, thermophoretic, van der Waals, and electrostatic double layer forces and their significance in nanofluid flows are discussed. Afterwards, the main models used to calculate the thermophysical properties of nanofluids are reviewed. This will be followed with the description of the main physical models presented for nanofluid flows and heat transfer, from single-phase to Eulerian and Lagrangian two-phase models. In part II, various computational fluid dynamics (CFD) techniques will be presented. Next, the latest studies on 3D simulation of nanofluid flow in various regimes and configurations are reviewed. The present review is expected to be helpful for researchers working on numerical simulation of nanofluids and also for scholars who work on experimental aspects of nanofluids to understand the underlying physical phenomena occurring during their experiments.

Suspensions of nanoparticles (i.e., particles with diameters < 100 nm) in liquids, termed nanofluids, show remarkable thermal and optical property changes from the base liquid at low particle loadings. Recent studies also indicate that selected nanofluids may improve the efficiency of direct absorption solar thermal collectors. To determine the effectiveness of nanofluids in solar applications, their ability to convert light energy to thermal energy must be known. That is, their absorption of the solar spectrum must be established. Accordingly, this study compares model predictions to spectroscopic measurements of extinction coefficients over wavelengths that are important for solar energy (0.25 to 2.5 μm). A simple addition of the base fluid and nanoparticle extinction coefficients is applied as an approximation of the effective nanofluid extinction coefficient. Comparisons with measured extinction coefficients reveal that the approximation works well with water-based nanofluids containing graphite nanoparticles but less well with metallic nanoparticles and/or oil-based fluids. For the materials used in this study, over 95% of incoming sunlight can be absorbed (in a nanofluid thickness ≥10 cm) with extremely low nanoparticle volume fractions - less than 1 × 10-5, or 10 parts per million. Thus, nanofluids could be used to absorb sunlight with a negligible amount of viscosity and/or density (read: pumping power) increase.

Following the 2002 M 7.9 Denali fault earthquake, clear changes in geyser activity and a series of local earthquake swarms were observed in the Yellowstone National Park area, despite the large distance of 3100 km from the epicenter. Several geysers altered their eruption frequency within hours after the arrival of large-amplitude surface waves from the Denali fault earthquake. In addition, earthquake swarms occurred close to major geyser basins. These swarms were unusual compared to past seismicity in that they occurred simultaneously at different geyser basins. We interpret these observations as being induced by dynamic stresses associated with the arrival of large-amplitude surface waves. We suggest that in a hydrothermal system dynamic stresses can locally alter permeability by unclogging existing fractures, thereby changing geyser activity. Furthermore, we suggest that earthquakes were triggered by the redistribution of hydrothermal fluids and locally increased pore pressures. Although changes in geyser activity and earthquake triggering have been documented elsewhere, here we present evidence for changes in a hydrothermal system induced by a large-magnitude event at a great distance, and evidence for the important role hydrothermal systems play in remotely triggering seismicity.