Unsteady flow of a fourth-grade fluid due to an oscillating plate

Abstract

The governing non-linear high-order, sixth-order in space and third-order in time, differential equation is constructed for the unsteady flow of an incompressible conducting fourth-grade fluid in a semi-infinite domain. The unsteady flow is induced by a periodically oscillating two-dimensional infinite porous plate with suction/blowing, located in a uniform magnetic field. It is shown that by augmenting additional boundary conditions at infinity based on asymptotic structures and transforming the semi-infinite physical space to a bounded computational domain by means of a coordinate transformation, it is possible to obtain numerical solutions of the non-linear magnetohydrodynamic equation. In particular, due to the unsymmetry of the boundary conditions, in numerical simulations non-central difference schemes are constructed and employed to approximate the emerging higher-order spatial derivatives. Effects of material parameters, uniform suction or blowing past the porous plate, exerted magnetic field and oscillation frequency of the plate on the time-dependent flow, especially on the boundary layer structure near the plate, are numerically analysed and discussed. The flow behaviour of the fourth-grade non-Newtonian fluid is also compared with those of the Newtonian fluid.