Heat Transfer Enhancement in Laminar Forced Convection: Nanofluids, Microchannels, Structured Surfaces

Hybrid Approach in Microscale Transport Phenomena: Application to Biodiesel Synthesis in Micro-reactors

“…The research reported here originated through a UK-Brazil Newton Fund-FAPERJ collaborative development project, offering a holistic approach to address the complex nexus challenges from the societal demand for food, water, energy and need for environmental care. The motivation involved a combined system, harnessing electrical energy from high efficiency water cooled HCPVs and using the resulting waste heat for water desalination and continuous biodiesel production, making use of nano and micro-scale transport phenomena analysis tools recently employed in different thermal engineering applications [8][9][10][11]. The original aspects of the present research includes problem formulation and simplification strategies, modern analytical-numerical solution methods for differential equations, parametric and functional identification through inverse analysis, symbolic computation tools, nano and micro-fabrication, non-intrusive optical techniques in micro-scale heat and fluid flow, employed individually or jointly, as needed to answer the basic questions raised by the applications to be advanced.…”

“…This chapter starts by describing the so-called hybrid approach that combines the computational-analytical-experimental tools to analyze a system and its behavior [12][13]. The impact of nano-and microtechnologies on transport enhancement has already been illustrated through some fundamental analysis around the three major paths [8], namely, miniaturization of heat exchange devices, thus bringing transport characteristic dimensions to the micro-scale, functionalization of the materials (solids and fluids) at the nanoscale, thus augmenting thermophysical properties, and geometrical structuring of micro-systems and passages, thus altering the transport or mixing mechanisms. These fundamental ideas and the hybrid analysis framework are here exemplified in a selected application involving the continuous synthesis of biodiesel in micro-reactors.…”