Thermal convection is recognized as one of the most valuable heat transfer modes for a wide range of applications, such as energy production, chemical processing, thermal management of electronics, and other systems, which include cooling or heating processes. Nanofluids are an emerging type of thermal fluid that is under extensive investigation aiming to enhance their thermal convection performance toward higher energy efficiency and miniaturization of devices and systems.^1,2  To date, many types of nanofluids have been produced and investigated under certain operating conditions using experimental and numerical methods. However, it can be noted from the previous studies in the literature that a large number of nanofluid types exist due to the opportunity to use different kinds of nanoparticles (metallic and non-metallic nanoparticles) in different base fluids, leading to the formation of superior thermophysical properties for a particular application.^3–7  Moreover, the nanofluid field is still under development and new types of nanofluids are being discovered, such as ionic liquid-based nanofluids,⁸  besides evaluating their performances under various conditions for possible applications. This leads to the importance of using flexible and low-cost investigation methods such as computational fluid dynamics (CFD), where numerical modelling is considered to be a very effective method to investigate the thermal convection performance of nanofluids.⁹