Natural convective nanofluid flow characteristics with Brownian motion effect in an annular space between confocal elliptic cylinders

Abstract

The principal aim of this work is to study numerically the natural convection in an annular space between confocal elliptic cylinders. The Brownian motion was added based on the thermal conductivity model and the simulation was carried out using finite volume control method. Various nanofluids with different volume concentrations were undertaken ranging from 2% to 6% and various Rayleigh numbers were tested for different particles. The isotherms and stream function are presented and it was clearly seen that by increasing the Rayleigh number, the heat transfer rate increases on the domain. On the other hand it was noticed that the heat transfer enhancement is less sensitive to the nanoparticles when the Brownian motion was considered

Keywords:

• Annular space
• Brownian motion
• nanofluids
• natural convection
• Nusselt number
• volume fraction

Authors’ contributions

A. Sabeur: conceived of the presented idea, developed the theory and performed the computations and contributed to the final version of the manuscript. M. Boussoufi: developed the theoretical formalism, performed the analytic calculations and performed the numerical simulations, discussed the results and contributed to the final manuscript.

Disclosure statement

The authors declared that there is no conflict of interest.