Numerical investigation of Von Karman swirling bioconvective nanofluid transport from a rotating disk in a porous medium with Stefan blowing and anisotropic slip effects
In recent years, significant progress has been made in modern micro- and nanotechnologies related to
applications in micro/nano-electronic devices. These technologies are increasingly utilizing sophisticated fluent
media to enhance performance. Among the new trends is the simultaneous adoption of nanofluids and biological
micro-organisms. Motivated by bio-nanofluid rotating disk oxygenators in medical engineering, in the current
work, a mathematical model is developed for steady convective Von Karman swirling flow from an
impermeable power-law radially stretched disk rotating in a Darcy porous medium saturated with nanofluid
doped with gyrotactic micro-organisms. Anisotropic slip at the wall and blowing effects due to concentration
are incorporated. The nano-bio transport model is formulated using non-linear partial differential equations
(NPDEs), which are transformed to a set of similarity ordinary differential equations (SODEs) by appropriate
transformations. The transformed boundary value problem is solved by a Chebyshev collocation method. The
impact of key parameters on dimensionless velocity components, concentration, temperature and motile
microorganism density distributions are computed and visualized graphically. Validation with previous studies
is included. It is found that that the effects of suction provide a better enhancement of the heat, mass and
microorganisms transfer in comparison to blowing. Moreover, physical quantities decrease with higher slip
parameters irrespective of the existence of blowing. Temperature is suppressed with increasing thermal
slip whereas nanoparticle concentration is suppressed with increasing wall mass slip. Micro-organism
density number increases with the greater microorganism slip. Radial skin friction is boosted with
positive values of the power law stretching parameter whereas it is decreased with negative values.
The converse response is computed for circumferential skin friction, nanoparticle mass transfer rate
and motile micro-organism density number gradient. Results from this study are relevant to novel
bioreactors, membrane oxygenators, food processing and bio-chromatography