Effect of Thermal Radiation on the Flow of a Boussinesq Couple Stress Nanofluid Over a Porous Nonlinear Stretching Sheet

In this article, we propose a mathematical model for the flow and heat transfer characteristics of a non-Newtonian fluid past a porous and nonlinearly stretching sheet. The fluid is assumed to be immersed in a graphene-water nanofluid in the presence of mass transpiration and thermal radiation. A set of suitable similarity transformations are used to reduce the nonlinear partial differential equations system to a nonlinear loosely-coupled ordinary differential equation system. The heat transfer characteristics are studied with two types of boundary conditions, namely the Prescribed Surface Temperature and the Prescribed Surface Heat Flux. The exact solution to the momentum nonlinear ordinary differential equation is obtained by Wentzel-Kramers-Brillouin method. The temperature equation is solved analytically by converting it to a Gaussian-confluent hypergeometric differential equation. The effects of the porous medium parameter, power of the surface temperature, prescribed heat flux on the velocity, and the temperature field are some of the important findings of this investigation. The current research has its applications in the manufacturing industry, liquid film condensation process, metal spinning etc. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature India Private Limited.