CFD BASED ANALYSIS OF LAMINAR FORCED CONVECTION OF NANOFLUID SEPARATED FLOW UNDER THE PRESENCE OF MAGNETIC FIELD

This paper deals with studying fluid flow and heat transfer of nanofluid through a forward facing step channel which is affected by a uniform magnetic field transverse to fluid flow. All the channel walls are assumed to be in constant temperature and the fluid temperature at the channel inlet is less than that of the walls. Also, the nanofluid is considered as a single-phase Newtonian fluid and the proper correlations were utilized to determine the thermophysical properties of nanofluid. Therefore, a code has been developed and two-dimensional continuity, momentum and energy equations were solved, using CFD technique. The computations were conducted for different values of the Reynolds and Hartmann numbers, and contraction ratio and an extensive range of nanoparticles volume fraction. The results indicated that flow separation and reattachment phenomena, in vicinity of the step edge, could be influenced strongly by magnetic field and the average Nusselt number is increased significantly by increasing nanoparticles volume fraction and Hartmann number.