Triple-diffusive magneto-nanofluid flow over a nonlinearly stretching sheet

Abstract

Magnetic nanofluid constitutes a special class of nanofluids that exhibit both magnetic and fluid properties. Due to its extensive applications, researchers used the magneto-nanofluid to investigate the thermos-diffusion effects on boundary layer flows. The impact on the thermos-diffusion of magneto-nanofluid over a linear stretching sheet was first introduced by Awad et al., (boundary value problems, 1–13, 2013), then Goyal et al., (microfluidics and nano fluidics, 17(3), 591–604) examined the effects of Brownian motion, thermophoresis, and cross-diffusion on the enhancement of convection features of the power-law stretching sheet. In the present study, we extend Goyal’s finding of the thermophoresis effect by including a magnetic field. Consequently, now five partial differential equations with the magnetic field parameter need to be solved, which are converted to ordinary differential equations with similarity transformations. Then, the resulting nonlinear coupled differential equations are solved analytically using the method of Directly Defining the inverse Mapping with the help of Maple software. This is the first time this novel method is used to solve a system with four non-linear coupled differential equations. The analytical results of the study are compared with the available numerical results for a special case and found good agreement. This leads to the conclusion that this novel method is accurate and can be applied to solve not only higher order but also a system of several non-linear differential equations. Further, the skin friction is analyzed for various values of the magnetic parameter. It is observed that, the velocity profile decreases as the magnetic parameter increases. However, quite the opposite is true on the skin friction.