Investigation of Velocity Profile in Time Dependent Boundary Layer Flow of a Modified Power-Law Fluid of Fourth Grade

Abstract

This paper deals with the investigation of time dependent boundary layer flow of a modified power-law fluid of fourth grade on a stretched surface with an injection or suction boundary condition. The fluid model is a mixture of fourth grade and power-law fluids in which the fluid may display shear thickening, shear thinning or normal stress textures. By using the scaling and translation transformations which is a type of Lie Group transformation, time dependent boundary layer equations are reduced into two alternative ordinary differential equations systems (ODEs) with boundary conditions. During this reduction, special Lie Group transformations are used for translation, scaling and combined transformation. Numerical solutions have been carried out for the ordinary differential equations for various fluids and boundary condition parameters. As a result of numerical analysis, it is observed that the boundary layer thickness decreases as the power-law index value increases. It was also observed that for the fourth-grade fluid parameter, as the parameter increases, the boundary layer thickness decreases while the velocity in the <i>y</i> direction increases.