Dear Editor of ASME Journal of Heat Transfer,
Since late 2007 we have been leading the International Nanofluid Property Benchmark Exercise, or INPBE, an initiative aimed at eliminating the many inconsistencies in the thermal conductivity database of colloidal suspensions of nanoparticles, also known as “nanofluids.” INPBE was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation, and involved 34 organizations from the US, Belgium, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Poland, Puerto Rico, Singapore, South Korea, Switzerland and the UK that participated in the exercise. A complete description of the exercise and its results has been published in an article that recently appeared in the Journal of Applied Physics (106, 094312, 2009). Viscosity data on the same series of samples collected by 10 INPBE participants will be published in Applied Rheology. However, given the general interest in nanofluids and the controversy surrounding their thermal conductivity, we...
