Abstract
The existence of solid-phase nanoparticles remarkably improves the thermal conductivity of the fluids. The enhancement in this property of the nanofluids is affected by different items such as the solid-phase volume fraction and dimensions, temperature, etc. In the current paper, three different mathematical models, including polynomial correlation, Multivariate Adaptive Regression Spline (MARS), and Group Method of Data Handling (GMDH), are applied to forecast the thermal conductivity of nanofluids containing MgO particles. The inputs of the model are the base fluid thermal conductivity, volume concentration, and average dimension of solid-phase, and nanofluids' temperature. Comparing the proposed models revealed higher confidence of GMDH in estimating the thermal conductivity, which is attributed to its complicated structure and more appropriate consideration of the input's interaction. The values of R-squared for the correlation, MARS, and GMDH are 0.9949, 0.9952, and 0.9991, respectively. In addition, based on the sensitivity analysis, the effect of thermal conductivity of the base fluid on the overall thermal conductivity of nanofluids is more remarkable compared with the other inputs such as volume fraction, temperature, and dimensions of the particles which are used as the inputs of the models.