Oscillatory blood flow through a capillary in presence of thermal radiation

Abstract

This paper deals with the theoretical investigation of a fundamental problem of magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) flow of blood in a capillary in the presence of thermal radiation and chemical reaction. The unsteadiness in the flow and temperature fields is caused by the time-dependence of the stretching velocity and the surface temperature. The fluid is considered to be non-Newtonian, whose flow is governed by the equation of a third-order fluid. The problem is first reduced to solving a system of coupled nonlinear differential equations involving several parameters. Considering blood as an electrically conducting fluid and using the present analysis, an attempt is made to compute some parameters of the blood flow by developing a suitable numerical method and by devising an appropriate finite difference scheme. The computational results are presented in graphical form, and thereby some theoretical predictions are made with respect to the hemodynamical flow of the blood in a hyperthermal state under the action of a magnetic field. Computational results for the variation in velocity, temperature, concentration, skin-friction coefficient, Nusselt number and Sherwood number are presented in graphical/tabular form. Since the study takes care of thermal radiation in blood flow, the results reported here are likely to have an important bearing on the therapeutic procedure of hyperthermia, particularly in understanding blood flow and heat transfer in capillaries.