, Farooq Hassan Ali 3
, Ammar I. Alsabery 4
, Songwei Hu 2
, D. Jing 2
, Hameed K. Hamzah 3
2International Research Center for Renewable Energy, State Key Laboratory of Multiphase Flow in Power Engineering, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an 710049, China
3Mechanical Engineering Department, College of Engineering, University of Babylon, Babylon, Iraq
4Refrigeration & Air-conditioning Technical Engineering Department, College of Technical Engineering, The Islamic University, Najaf, Iraq; Centre for Modelling and Data Analysis, Faculty of Science & Technology, University Kebangsaan Malaysia, 43600 Bangi Selangor, Malaysia
Abstract
In this study, the mixed convection heat transfer in a mechanical ball bearing filled with nano-lubricants were investigated theoretically. In our case, the bearing including eight balls revolving in counter clockwise while the inner shaft rotates in clockwise direction and the inner and outer walls of bearing were kept at constant hot and cold temperatures, respectively. Two kinds of nano-lubricants SiO2-water and Alumina- Polyalphaolefin (PAO) with different shapes of nanoparticles were considered. The governing equations including velocity, pressure, and temperature formulation were solved based on the Galerkin finite element method. The governing parameters such as nanoparticle volume fraction, Reynolds and Rayleigh numbers, etc., were discussed. It turns out that the average Nusselt number increases by increasing the nanoparticle volume fraction (averagely 15% for each 0.02 increase) and the oil-based nano-lubricant has greater Nusselt number than the water based one. More importantly, the Nono-rod Alumina was found to show much greater heat transfer performance (averagely 5%) than the spherical alumina nanoparticles and nano-rod Alumina-PAO has the best performance and maximum Nusselt numbers for the heat transfer.
