Supervised Learning Method for Prediction of Heat Transfer Characteristics of Nanofluids

Abstract

This study focuses on the alication and investigation of the predictive ability of artificial intelligence in the numerical modelling of nanofluid flows. Numerical and experimental methods are powerful tools from an accuracy point of view, but they are also time- and cost-consuming methods. Therefore, using soft-computing techniques can improve such CFD drawbacks by patterning the CFD data. After obtaining the aropriate ANN and ANFIS architecture using the CFD data, many new data can be created without requiring numerical and experimental methods. In the scope of this research, the FCM-ANFIS and ANN methods are used to predict the thermal behaviour of the turbulent flow in a heated pipe with several nanoparticles. A parametric CFD study is carried out for water-TiO2, water-CuO, and water-SiO2 nanofluid through a pipe. The Reynolds number is varied between 7000 and 15000, and the nanofluid concentration is varied between 0.25 % and 4 %. The effects of using nanofluid on local values of Nusselt number and shear stress distribution were investigated. Numerical results indicate that with the increasing nanoparticle volume fraction of nanofluid, the average Nusselt number increases, but the required pumping power also increases. The obtained soft computing results demonstrate that the FCM clustering ANFIS has given better results both in training and testing when it is compared to the ANN architecture with an R-2 of 0.9983. Regarding this, the FCM-ANFIS is an excellent candidate for calculating the Nusselt number in heat transfer problems.