NUMERICAL STUDY OF MIXED BIOCONVECTION IN POROUS MEDIA SATURATED WITH NANOFLUID CONTAINING OXYTACTIC MICROORGANISMS

Abstract

A mathematical model has been developed for steady-state boundary layer flow of a nanofluid past an impermeable vertical flat wall in a porous medium saturated with a water-based dilute nanofluid containing oxytactic microorganisms. The nanoparticles were distributed sufficiently to permit bioconvection. The product of chemotaxis constant and maximum cell swimming speed was assumed invariant. Using appropriate transformations, the partial differential conservation equations were non-dimensionalised to yield a quartet of coupled, non-linear ordinary differential equations for momentum, energy, nanoparticle concentration and dimensionless motile microorganism density, with appropriate boundary conditions. The dominant parameters emerging in the normalised model included the bioconvection Lewis number, bioconvection Peclet number, Lewis number, buoyancy ratio parameter, Brownian motion parameter, thermophoresis parameter, local Darcy-Rayleigh number and the local Peclet number. An implicit numerical solution to the well-posed two-point non-linear boundary value problem is developed using the well-tested and highly efficient Keller box method. Computations are validated with the Nakamura tridiagonal implicit finite difference method, demonstrating excellent agreement. Nanoparticle concentration and temperature were found to be generally enhanced through the boundary layer with increasing bioconvection Lewis number, whereas dimensionless motile microorganism density was only increased closer to the wall. Temperature, nanoparticle concentration and dimensionless motile microorganism density were all greatly increased with a rise in Peclet number. Temperature and dimensionless motile microorganism density were reduced with increasing buoyancy parameter, whereas nanoparticle concentration was increased. The present study found applications in the fluid mechanical design of microbial fuel cell and bioconvection nanotechnological devices.