LAUSR

Abstract Ionic liquids are an innovative class of fluids having a wide range of potential applications from chemical industries and processes to energy harvesting particularly in solar power plants. Also, these liquids are non-flammable and non-volatile at ambient conditions and recyclable, and are also considered as green fluids. All these important features make them as new alternatives in many applications. Adding nanoparticles to these ionic liquids gets to a new challenging area, which is a special type of nanofluids, termed “ionanofluids”. This review summarizes recent research and development in this innovative area and tries to assess all results by comparing them on the same numerical basis. Although literature results are scattered, they demonstrate that ionanofluids possess great potential in many new and advanced applications particularly related to thermal management and energy harvesting. Literature findings of these new fluids were also implemented in computational fluid dynamics in order to analyze their behavior at thermal systems. Results are very interesting in demonstrating their possible usage for heating and it also underlies the large uncertainty that exists in characterizing thermophysical properties of these new fluids. Nonetheless research on ionanofluids is very important and tremendous efforts are needed in order to fully describe these new heat transfer fluids and to explore their potential in wide range of applications.