Influence of various linearly heating profiles on buoyancy-driven flow in an enclosure filled with nanofluid

From the application point of view, it is practical to consider a non-uniform heat-flux model during a buoyancyinduced flow. In this direction, the present study is conducted considering a square-shaped cavity occupied with water-based nanofluid, where Cu is used as colloidal suspension of nanoparticles. The investigation is performed through several numerical simulations considering adiabatic top and bottom walls and a uniformly maintained cold wall on the right side. The left sidewall is exposed to a non-uniform heating flux. Here, this heating is applied by varying the slope of heat flux profiles. Two different cases are studied in this work: linearly rising (Case 1) and falling (Case 2) heat-fluxes. For both cases, the power input remains the same. The analyses of thermofluid structure and entropy generation (EG) in the system are examined. EG addresses the thermodynamic irreversibility rate in the flow domain. The results indicate the entropy production nearly remains the same for the various slope of linearly decreasing heating profiles. However, the entropy production monotonically increases with an increase in the slope of linearly increasing heating profiles.