Abstract

The effect of time-periodic two-frequency rotation modulation on Rayleigh-Benard convection in water with either AA7072 or AA7075 nanoparticles is investigated. The single-phase description of the Khanafer-Vafai-Lightstone model is used for modeling the nanoliquids. An asymptotic expansion procedure is adopted in the case of the linear stability to obtain the correction (due to modulation) to the Rayleigh number at marginal stability of unmodulated convection. A nonlinear regime of convection is considered with a nonautonomous generalized Lorenz model as the governing equation. The method of multiscales is then employed to obtain the coupled nonautonomous Ginzburg-Landau equations with cubic nonlinearity from the Lorenz model. These equations are presented in the phase-amplitude form and the amplitude is used to quantify the heat transport. The modulation amplitude is considered to be small (of order less than unity) and moderate frequencies of modulation are considered. We found that there is a threshold frequency beyond which the system behavior reverses. At frequencies below the threshold, the mean Nusselt number increases with an increase in the amplitude of modulation while an opposite influence is seen for values above the threshold. Such a behavior is a consequence of what is analogously seen in the case of the critical Rayleigh number. The influence of two-frequency modulation is more pronounced on the results of the linear and nonlinear regimes compared to that of the single-frequency one. The heat transport is enhanced due to the presence of dilute concentration of suspended nanoparticles (either AA7072 or AA7075 nanoalloys) in water. The influence of nanoparticles is to modify the threshold values generating chaos but it does not qualitatively alter the dynamical behavior of the system. The plots of Lyapunov exponents reveal that there is no possibility of hyper-chaos in the generalized Lorenz model when there is a rotational modulation.