Numerical Investigation of MHD Carreau Nanofluid Flow with Nonlinear Thermal Radiation and Joule Heating by Employing Darcy–Forchheimer Effect over a Stretching Porous Medium

Abstract

Heat transfer in fluid mechanisms has a stronghold in everyday activities. To this end, nanofluids take a leading position in the advent of the betterment of thermal conductivity. The present study examines numerical investigations of incompressible magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) flow of Carreau nanofluid by considering nonlinear thermal radiation, Joule heating, temperature-dependent heat source/sink, and chemical reactions with attached Brownian movement and thermophoresis above a stretching sheet that saturates the porous medium. Pertaining similarity assumptions are used to change the flow equations into tractable forms of higher order nonlinear ordinary differential equations (ODEs). The continuation technique is adopted in the MATLAB bvp4c package for the numerical outcomes. The velocity, temperature, and nanoparticle concentration distributions in contrast to the leading parameters are availed in graphical and tabular descriptions. Among the many outcomes, increasing the radiation parameter from 0.2 to 0.8 surged the heat transfer rate by 47.78 % at n = 1.5 and lifted it only by 8.5 % at n = 0.5. By boosting the magnetic parameter from 0 to 1.5, respective 37.64 % and 20.17 % rises in local drag forces are achieved in shear-thickening and thinning regions. On top of that, chemical reactions and Brownian motion parameters decay the concentration field. The distinctiveness of this method is that a solution is secured for the problem, which is highly sensitive to initial and boundary conditions. It will be worth mentioning that these fluid flow models will be applicable in various fields, such as engineering, petroleum, nuclear safety processes, and medical science.