A New Heat Carrier for Thermal Management of Spacecrafts

A new heat carrier for thermal management of spacecrafts, nanofluid, was prepared by suspending nanoscaled copper particles in the conventional process fluid. The transient hot-wire method and NXE-1 viscometer were respectively used to measure the thermal conductivity and the apparent viscosity of the nanofluids. The effects of the volume fraction of nanoparticles and the temperature on the transport properties were discussed. The experimental results reveal that the nanoparticles remarkably increase thermal conductivity of the fluid and the nanofluids has remarkably higher thermal conductivity than that of the conventional pure fluid. It shows that such nanofluid has great potential for thermal management and thermal control in the field of aerospace technology.