Prediction of Thermal conductivity of nanofluids by molecular dynamic simulation

A theoretical approach based on molecular dynamics modeling, for the estimation of the thermal conductivity of liquids by the introduction of nanofuids is proposed. Algorithms are developed for simulating the nanofluid abiding the procedural steps of the molecular dynamics method. The method is presented as a solution to the generic problem of thermal conductivity enhancement of liquids in the presence of nanoparticles, and illustrated using a specific simulation procedure with properties representing using nanoparticles. In the present work we prepare water molecules in initial FCC structure and we assumed an initial velocity for molecules and used calculated potential energy balance and the Newton’s second law of motion to figure the intermolecular forces and calculated the electrostatic interactions between water molecules by Ewald sum method and it gave a potential energy 1.5 times bigger than Sankar et al.’s work. The calculation of thermal conductivity using the molecular dynamics simulation is compared with Maxwell model, Sankar et al.’s work and experimental data by the errors of 4.1% , 1.6% and 12% respectively.