Abstract
Many alternative ecofriendly quenchants have been developed to replace mineral oil such as vegetable oils, polymer quenchants, and nanofluids. Although vegetable oils show superior cooling performance to mineral oil, their use is limited due to high production costs and low thermal stability. In this study, used coconut oil was chemically treated and its cooling and heat transfer characteristics were compared with that of refined coconut oil and mineral oil. The thermophysical properties of chemically treated waste coconut oil were found to be higher than that of the other oils tested, and its wettability proved to be better as well. Quenching experiments using an Inconel 600 probe (as per ISO 9950 and ASTM D 6200 standards) showed that the vapor blanket stage was shorter for the chemically treated oil than either of the others. The treated waste oil was also found to have the highest average peak heat flux based on the solution to the inverse heat conduction problem.
