Chemically reactive MHD convective flow and heat transfer performance of ternary hybrid nanofluid past a curved stretching sheet

Abstract

One of the topmost challenges of today’s industry age is to find an efficient heat transfer fluid because heat transfer rate in common fluids is unable to provide an efficient heating and cooling process in the industries. Ternary hybrid nanofluids are considered as next generation heat transfer fluids, which are prepared by suspension of three different type of nanoparticles in the base fluids. This novel class of nanofluids, due to its unique and dynamic thermophysical properties, has diverse applications in numerous arenas of nanotechnology and heat transfer appliances. This research article examines an electrically conducting and magnetically influenced 2D flow of modified hybrid nanofluid past a curved stretching sheet. The considered trihybrid nanofluid contains nanometer sized particles of three different materials (CuO, Al2O3, TiO2) suspended in the water. The preliminary assumptions in this numerical investigation include the exponential heating, Brownian motion, chemical factor, and thermophoresis effects. At boundary, convective mass and heat flux constraints are employed. This pragmatic investigation with the aforementioned presumption is conducted for the first time to evaluate heat and mass transference properties of ternary nanofluid past a curved stretchable surface. The problem is mathematically modelled by using the fundamental momentum and energy equations and modified to cater the solid additives concentration in the base fluid. The modelled Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) are subsequently transformed into Ordinary Differential Equations (ODEs) by employing suitable similarity transformation and subsequently solved by the MATLAB software bvp4c to demonstrate role of important controlling parameters in tabular and graphical form. The research concludes that the enhancement of curvature factor enhances the velocity profile while the impact is opposite for magnetic factor. The most important and an interesting aspect of this innovative study is that the rate of heat transfer increases for all embedding parameters (ie M,K,Nb,Nt,Ec,Δt,β,BiT,BiCandQe), which is the basic purpose of using nanofluids for their promising use in nanotechnology. The study reveals that frictional force at the stretching surface decreases by reducing curvature of surface. However, converse trend is observed for increasing magnetic factor. Moreover, said impact of curvature is more prominent for ternary hybrid nanofluid whereas M has greater impact for unitary nanofluid. The greater heat source factor, activation energy, concentration and thermal Biot numbers, temperature difference and thermophoresis factors increase the concentration boundary layer while decreasing trend is observed for Brownian motion, Schmidt number and chemical reaction factor. The Nusselt number increases for higher values of thermal Biot number, thermophoresis parameter and the heat source factor.