Mesoscopic study of miscible nanoflow instabilities

Nanofluids have recently been introduced as a remedy to control flowinstability. The complex behavior of nanoparticles under different hydrodynamic and thermodynamic conditions makes the modeling and predictions of the process complicated, and such an erratic nature entails the carefully scrutinized analysis of hydrodynamic movement and deposition of nanoparticles. In this study, the effects of nanoparticles on instability are examined using the lattice Boltzmann approach. The flow geometry is a porous medium consisting of regularly arranged disks, and the adopted mesoscopic model accounts for heat transfer effects as well as nanoparticle deposition. A new probabilistic model has been proposed for particle deposition to better predict the behavior of nanoparticles. It is shown that nanoparticles behave differently at various viscous regimes and the instability is controlled by physical and chemical properties of the nanoparticles. The study also reveals some interesting behavior of nanoparticles at different sizes and surface potentials which directly affect the instability. Furthermore, thermal induced instabilities show how nanoparticles behave differently at various temperatures. Published by AIP Publishing.