Investigation on magnetic force and buoyancy force on flow and heat transfer of Al₂O₃-water nanofluid at various temperature-dependent thermophysical models by a novel PLBM

A novel preconditioned lattice Boltzmann method (PLBM) is applied to investigate the thermo-hydrodynamic characteristics of Al₂O₃-water nanofluid with various temperature-dependent thermophysical properties and slip boundary conditions in a microchannel. Also, the effects of a magnetic field force, buoyancy force, and volume fraction of nanoparticles are analyzed, respectively. The theoretical level confirms that the convergence performance of the PLBM is greatly improved at large Reynolds numbers compared to the original LBM. Numerical results show that the Koo & Kleinstreuer model has the largest average shear stress and average Nusselt number. Among all the physical models considered, these two values are approximately 1.05 times and 1.2 times of the values by the Maxwell & Brinkmann model, respectively. Once the magnetic field is considered, the average shear stress is increased twice and the average Nusselt number increases by about 10% and further by about 20% at higher buoyancy forces. The growth of these two values gradually slows down when the volume fraction of nanoparticles exceeds 2%. The heat transfer process makes the largest contribution to entropy generation when the magnetic field force is not considered. Accordingly, it will dominate the irreversible loss due to the strong shear stress once the magnetic field force is involved in the heat transfer process.