Numerical investigation of MHD stagnation-point flow and heat transfer of sodium alginate non-Newtonian nanofluid

Abstract

Abstract A rigorous analysis of unsteady magnetohydrodynamic mixed convection and electrically conducting nanofluid model with a stretching/shrinking wedge is presented. First, the governing partial differential equations for momentum and energy conservation are converted to coupled nonlinear ordinary differential equations by means of exact similarity transformation. The homotopy analysis method (HAM) is employed to obtain the analytical approximations for flow velocity and temperature distributions of alumina-sodium alginate naofluid. The solution is found to be dependent on some parameters including the nanoparticle volume fraction, unsteadiness parameter, magnetic parameter, mixed convection parameter and the generalized prandtl number. A systematic study is carried out to illustrate the effects of these parameters on the velocity and temperature distributions. Also, the value of skin friction coefficient and local Nusselt number are compared with copper-sodium alginate and titania-sodium alginate nanofluids.