Natural Convection of Blood–Magnetic Iron Oxide Bio-nanofluid in the Context of Hyperthermia Treatment

Abstract

Hyperthermia, an alternative medical approach aiming at locally increasing the temperature of a tumor, can cause the “death” of cancer cells or the sensitization of them to chemotherapeutic drugs and radiation. In contrast with the conventional treatments, hyperthermia provokes no injury to normal tissues. In particular, magnetic hyperthermia can utilize iron oxide nanoparticles, which can be administered intravenously to heat tumors under an alternating magnetic field. Currently, there is no theoretical model in the relative literature for the effective thermal conductivity of blood and magnetic nanoparticles. The scope of the present study is twofold: (a) development of a theoretical relationship, based on experimental findings and blood structure and (b) study of the laminar natural convection in a simplified rectangular porous enclosure, by using the asymptotic expansions method for deriving ordinary differential equations of the mass, momentum and energy balances, as a first approach of investigating heat transfer and providing theoretical guidelines. In short, the thermal conductivity of the resulting bio-nanofluid tends to increase by both increasing the concentration of the nanoparticles and the temperature. Furthermore, the heat transfer is enhanced for more intense internal heating (large Rayleigh numbers) and more permeable media (large Darcy numbers), while larger nanoparticle concentrations tend to suppress the flow.