Magnetohydrodynamic mixed convection and entropy generation analysis of Al₂O₃-water nanofluid past a confined circular cylinder

Numerical simulations are carried out for transient magnetohydrodynamic mixed convective heat transfer of alumina–water nanofluid flow past an isothermal circular cylinder confined in an electrically insulated rectangular duct in the presence of a uniform transverse magnetic field. A control volume method is used to solve the governing equations on a nonuniform Cartesian grid, and the cylinder is imposed using the immersed boundary method. Numerical experiments are performed for a Reynolds number based on the cylinder diameter of ReD=200, blockage ratio of BR=0.2, Richardson numbers of (Ri=−1;0;2), nanoparticle volume fractions of (φ=0.0;0.1;0.2), and Hartmann numbers in the range 0≤Ha≤13. In this work, mean and instantaneous flow and thermal distributions are analyzed graphically, and their corresponding sensitivity to the nanoparticle volume fraction has been determined. Numerical predictions demonstrate the impact of buoyancy and magnetic parameters regarding the spatial development and shedding characteristics of the near wake, and we explore their potential use to selectively excite or suppress vortex shedding, augmentation of heat transfer, and entropy generation minimization in nanofluid flow. The results reported herein indicate that depending on the parametric set, linear and nonlinear flow response to magnetic excitation is observed with bifurcations between different states. The outcome of the study shows that vortex shedding is completely suppressed when a critical value of the Hartmann number is reached, and that the threshold value of the Hartmann number strongly depends on the value of the buoyancy parameter and nanoparticle volume fraction. Based on the entropy distributions, we show that for all values of the nanoparticle volume fraction and in the range of buoyancy and magnetic parameters considered in this work, the entropy generation is dominated by irreversibilities due to heat transfer and the relative contributions of entropy generation due to fluid friction and magnetic effect are not preponderate. © 2022 Elsevier Ltd