Nanofluids are suspensions of nanoparticles in a base heat-transfer liquid. They have been widely investigated to boost heat transfer since they were proposed in the 1990s. We present a statistical correlation analysis of experimentally measured thermal conductivity of water-based nanofluids available in the literature. The influences of particle concentration, particle size, temperature and surfactants are investigated. For specific materials (alumina, titania, copper oxide, copper, silica and silicon carbide), separate analyses are performed. The conductivity increases with the concentration in qualitative agreement with Maxwells theory of homogeneous media. The conductivity also increases with the temperature (in addition to the improvement due to the increased conductivity with water). Surprisingly, only silica nanofluids exhibit a statistically significant effect of particle size, whereby smaller particles lead to faster heat transfer. Overall, the large scatter in the experimental data prevents a compelling, unambiguous assessment of these effects. Taken together, the results of our analysis suggest that more comprehensive experimental characterizations of nanofluids are necessary to estimate their practical potential.
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