https://doi.org/10.1140/epjp/s13360-026-07448-4
Regular Article
Thermodynamic optimization of bioconvective Jeffrey nanofluid–microorganism systems in MHD flow over stretching cylinders
1
Department of Mathematics, Sri Ramkrishna Sarada Vidya Mahapitha, 712612, Hooghly, West Bengal, India
2
Department of Physics, Sri Ramkrishna Sarada Vidya Mahapitha, 712612, Hooghly, West Bengal, India
a
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Received:
26
December
2025
Accepted:
15
February
2026
Published online:
2
March
2026
Abstract
This study investigates magnetohydrodynamic convective transport in Jeffrey-type nanofluids containing swimming microorganisms along a stretched cylindrical surface, combining Buongiorno’s diffusion model and full irreversibility analysis. The mathematical model reduces the boundary-layer conservation equations to a set of coupled nonlinear ODEs using similarity-variable reduction with numerical solutions obtained through adaptive Runge–Kutta–Fehlberg iteration with slope-adjustment convergence. Systematic variation of parameters investigates the influence of viscoelastic relaxation (λ, β), electromagnetic forcing (M), microbial motility (Pe), particle random motion (Nb), particle thermophoretic migration (Nt), and surface curvature (γ) on velocity, thermal, concentration, and population density distributions across the boundary layer. The total entropy production can be decomposed into five different dissipation mechanisms, namely, thermal conduction losses, viscous friction work, electromagnetic resistive heating, particle diffusion gradients, and as a novelty in this work-entropy generated by microbial transport gradients. The results of the simulations show that the viscoelastic behaviour decreases the wall shear stress by 65.7%, while it increases the convective heat transfer rates by 12.8% and decreases overall entropy generation by 18.6%, compared to the non-viscoelastic benchmarks. This is due to stress memory effects damping velocity gradients. The electromagnetic field strength exerts nonlinear thermal coupling, where thermal performance is maximized near M = 0.5–0.7 before resistive heating becomes the strong factor, contributing 35.73% entropy at M = 1.0. The active swimming response of the organisms augments microbial boundary-layer flux by 66%, whereas organism-related diffusion contributes 5–9% of the cumulative irreversibility. A unique biotic–abiotic coupling mechanism, which is expressed as − Pe(ϕ′χ′ + χϕ′′), quantifies mutual influences between the suspended particles and the motile organisms. The curvature in surface topology improves mass transfer intensity by 153% compared to the flat surface analogues. Constrained optimization analysis recommends optimal operating regimes as λ = 0.5, M ≤ 0.5, Pe = 0.5 for achieving the best transport efficiency with minimum energy loss, providing practical selection criteria for biotechnological reactors, industrial cooling apparatus, and magnetically driven hybrid systems where augmented transport and thermodynamic performance are the interlinked objectives.
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© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Società Italiana di Fisica and Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2026
Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
