Falkner-Skan flow of a magnetic-Carreau fluid past a wedge in the presence of cross diffusion effects

Abstract

Heat and mass transfer in the Falkner-Skan flow of a Carreau fluid past a wedge is investigated numerically. In most of the existing studies thermal radiation is linear. Due to the prominent importance of the various industrial applications, in this study we considered the nonlinear thermal radiation along with cross diffusion effects for the heat and mass transfer controlling process. Numerical results are presented graphically as well as in tabular form by enforcing Runge-Kutta and Newton's methods. We also validated the present results by comparing with the published results and found favourable agreement. We presented solutions for the flow separation, decelerating and accelerating cases. We observed that the thermal and concentration boundary layers are non-uniform for the flow separation, decelerating and accelerating cases. For industrial needs, we analysed the heat and mass transfer rates of the accelerating, decelerating and flow separation cases and found that the heat transfer rate is high in the accelerating case when compared with the decelerating case. From this we can conclude that the decelerating flow over a wedge is very useful for cooling applications.