Abstract The current study is made to analyze the impact of local thermal nonequilibrium (LTNE) on the steady, incompressible, and viscous Ostwald-de-Waele nano-liquid over a rotating disk in a porous medium with the various power law index, due to many remarkable applications, such as aeronautical systems, rotating machineries, air cleaning machineries, electrical power-generating systems, heat exchangers, gas turbines, centrifugal pumps. To describe the modeling of the nano-liquid, Brownian movement and thermophoresis are employed with the passive control boundaries. Three temperature model is adopted to distinguish the temperature among the fluid, particle, and solid. The governing transport equations have been converted to a system of nonlinear coupled ordinary differential equations by employing von Karman transformation. Numerical results of the flow and heat and transfer characteristics of the fluid, particle, and solid are obtained by applying Runge–Kutta–Fehlberg method (RKF) together with the shooting technique. The numerical results in the present work are compared with the published results for the case of thermal equilibrium and found that they are in good agreement. It is observed that the temperature profile significantly varies with the fluid-particle, fluid-solid interphase heat transfer coefficients and the modified thermal capacity ratios.