With the rapid development of industry, heat removal and management is a major concern for any technology. Heat transfer plays a critically important role in many sectors of engineering; nowadays utilizing nanofluids is one of the relatively optimized techniques to enhance heat transfer. In the present work, a facile low-temperature solvothermal method was employed to fabricate the SnO2/reduced graphene oxide (rGO) nanocomposite. X-ray diffraction (XRD), thermogravimetric analysis (TGA), X-ray photoelectron spectroscope (XPS), Raman spectroscopy, and transmission electron microscopy (TEM) have been performed to characterize the SnO2/rGO nanocomposite. Numerous ultrasmall SnO2 nanoparticles with average diameters of 3–5 nm were anchored on the surface of rGO, which contain partial hydrophilic functional groups. Water-based SnO2/rGO nanofluids were prepared with various weight concentrations by using an ultrasonic probe without adding any surfactants. The zeta potential was measured to investigate the stability of the as-prepared nanofluid which exhibited great dispersion stability after quiescence for 60 days. A thermal properties analyzer was employed to measure thermal conductivity of water-based SnO2/rGO nanofluids, and the results showed that the enhancement of thermal conductivity could reach up to 31% at 60 °C under the mass fraction of 0.1 wt %, compared to deionized water.

Thermal conductivity is one of key parameters of adsorbents, which will affect the overall system performance of adsorption chiller. To improve adsorbent's thermal conductivity is always one of research focuses in chemisorption field. A new chemical composite adsorbent is fabricated by adding carbon coated metal(Aluminum and Nickel) nanoparticles with three different addition amounts into the mixture of chloride salts and natural expanded graphite aiming to improve the thermal conductivity. The preparation processes and its thermal conductivity of this novel composite adsorbent are reported and summarized. Experimental results indicate that the nanoparticles are homogenously dispersed in the composite adsorbent by applying the reported preparation processes. The thermal conductivity of the composite adsorbent can averagely enlarge by 20% when the weight ratio of the added nanoparticles is 10 wt%. Moreover, carbon coated aluminum nanoparticles exhibit more effective enlargement in thermal conductivity than nickel nanoparticles. As for the composite adsorbent of CaCl 2-NEG, there is a big reinforcement from 30% to 50% for Al@C nanoparticles, however only 10% in maximum caused by Ni@C nanoparticles. The proposed research provides a methodology to design and prepare thermal conductive chemical composite adsorbent.

Ni/DMC composites with unique structure were synthesized through a facile two-step method, of which the Ni nanoparticle in mesopores act as scattering centers to intensify the multiple reflection of EM waves and improve the absorption efficiency.

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