Electromagnetic Bioconvective Trihybrid Nanofluids Over an Inclined Cylinder with Comparative Multi-Regression Analysis

Abstract

In nature, bioconvection generated by motile microorganisms may offer great opportunities in various applications such as environmental engineering, renewable energy technologies, and biomedical applications. In this paper, for the enrichment of heat transport and the regulation of bioconvection, a trihybrid nanofluid composed of gold (Au), silver (Ag), and multi-walled carbon nanotube (MWCNT) nanoparticles are considered within an MHD flow over a stretching cylinder. Unlike common single-nanoparticle nanofluids, trihybrid nanofluids utilize the synergistic behavior of multiple nanoparticles to achieve superior thermal conductivity, improved energy transport, and increased stability of fluids. The various key physical mechanisms incorporated here are thermal radiation, internal heat generation or absorption, electroosmotic effects and electromagnetic forces, to evaluate their impacts on microbial motility and bio-convective flow behavior. Furthermore, an activation energy-based chemical reaction is considered to show the moderation in microbial activity and enhancement in system performance. This set of coupled nonlinear partial differential equations is reduced to a system of ODEs by invoking proper similarity transformations and solved numerically via the Galerkin finite element method (G-FEM). Both multiple linear and quadratic regression analyses have been performed to develop the predictive models. It has been observed that the quadratic model presents more reliable and accurate predictions compared to the linear one. In general, the results show that bioconvection can be effectively controlled through adjusting parameters of the bioconvective Schmidt number, Peclet number, and Biot number to enhance heat and mass transfer characteristics of the system.