Thermal performance evaluation of graphene oxide and silicone oil-based nanofluid for multisituation porous media flow using nanoparticle’s shape-dependent thermophysical characteristics

Nanofluids exhibit critical significance in several phenomena, such as cooling processes, energy efficiency and storage, wear reduction, and flow control. The conducted study evaluates diverse aspects of such phenomena and highlights the crucial role of nanofluids for industrial applications. This study aims to determine how the inclusion of graphene oxide nanoparticles would ameliorate various mechanical and thermal features of silicone oil. The disturbance in the energy boundary layer and flow patterns resulting due to the simultaneous influence of multiple phenomena, for instance, magnetic force, shape diversity of nanoparticles, radiative flux, free convection, and flow permeability capacity of a porous medium, is extensively investigated. This evaluation delves into intricate details of particles’ shape impacts also. Particularly, brick, spherical, platelet, blade, and cylindrical structures of nanoparticles are studied through mathematical modeling. The principal step of methodology is to generalize the system to a fractional form by following the Caputo–Fabrizio operator. This is achieved by introducing new unit-free parameters into the mathematical system to develop a unitless model. Through the utilization of the Laplace transform, the exact solutions of the subsequent fractional system are determined. The results disclose that the heat transfer capacity of the nanofluid is highest when graphene oxide particles composed of blade shapes are added. This is the reason that the cooling performance of the observed nanofluid in this case is almost 27% higher than that of regular silicone oil. Furthermore, for spherical and platelet shapes, respectively, the least and maximum viscosities of the nanofluid are noted.