Magnetohydrodynamic mixed convection of nanofluid flow in a split lid driven cavity using finite element method

A computational study on the effect of magnetohydrodynamic mixed convection of nanofluid flow in a square split lid driven cavity with a block placed near the bottom wall is undertaken. Two different nanoparticles gold and alumina are considered for the study. The observations for the study are obtained by solving the non-dimensionalized governing equations by Finite Element Method with variational approach as accessible with the FreeFEM++ software. The results for different Prandtl numbers (Pr), Richardson number (Ri), volume fractions of nanoparticles ( φ ) , Reynolds number (Re), and MHD parameters (M) are displayed through graphs and figures. It has been observed that the pressure distribution significantly increases with the increment in Reynolds number but both the nanoparticles behave differently. The magnetic field enhancement (M = 0.1, 0.2, 0.5 and 0.9) decreases the velocity within the cavity. The convective heat transfer is faster in the case of Reynolds number (Re) = 100 than in the case of Reynolds number (Re) = 14 or 21. And also increasing the Richardson Number from 0.1 to 1.0, the average Nusselt number shows increment of ∼9.5% and with Ri = 1.0 to 10.0, an increment of ∼3% whereas decrement with higher Reynolds Number (Re = 21, 100) for Gold and Allumina nanoparticles respectively. The present simulations have various applications for the study of natural phenomenon like climate control, meteorological and geophysical activities and industrial applications like cooling of electronics equipment, heat exchanger.