Measurement of the specific heat capacity of water-based Al2O3 nanofluid

In this letter, we have presented an experimental investigation of the specific heat cp of water-based Al2O3 nanofluid with a differential scanning calorimeter. The result indicates that the specific heat cp of nanofluid decreases gradually as the nanoparticle volume fraction ϕ increases from 0.0% to 21.7%. The relationship between them exhibits good agreement with the prediction from the thermal equilibrium model [Eq. (2)]. The other simple mixing model [Eq. (1)] fails to predict the specific heat cp of nanofluid.