The objective of this experimental investigation is to assess the variations of thermal conductivity and viscosity of
liquid paraffin-Al2O3 nanofluid containing oleic acid surfactant against temperature, nanoparticle mass concentration
and surfactant concentration. The experiments are performed in the temperature range of 20–50 °C, nanoparticle
mass concentration range of 1–5%, and surfactant/nanoparticle mass ratio of 1:3, 2:3 and 3:3. The results
showed that the nanofluid behaves as a shear thinning fluid. Besides, it was found that boosting the nanoparticle
concentration causes an increase in the thermal conductivity and viscosity, while augmenting the temperature results
in a decrease in the viscosity and an increase in the thermal conductivity. Moreover, it was observed that the
viscosity increases with surfactant concentration, while the thermal conductivity initially rises with surfactant concentration
and then reduces. Furthermore, the Artificial Neural Network (ANN) was implemented to model the
thermal conductivity and viscosity of the nanofluid using experimental data. The findings depicted that the thermal
conductivity model predicts the outputs with RMS, RMSE, MAE and R2 values of 0.0381, 0.0018, 0.0015 and 0.982,
respectively. Meanwhile, these values for the viscosity model were respectively 0.0662, 0.0179, 0.0044 and 0.96