Flow and Heat Transfer Analysis of a Nanofluid along a Vertical Flat Plate in Presence of Thermal Radiation Using Similarity Transformation Method.

Abstract

In the present work effects of viscous dissipation and thermal radiationon convective heat transfer in nanofluid flow over a stretching sheet under the influence of applied magnetic field was analyzed. Three types of nanofluids, namely Cu-water, Al 2 O 3-water and TiO 2-water were considered. A similarity transformation was used to obtain a system of non-linear ordinary differential equation which was then solved numerically using MATLAB "bvp4c" function. Numerical results were obtained for Local Nusselt number as well as velocity and temperature profiles for selected values of parameters such as nanoparticle volume fraction Φ, Eckert number E C , Magnetic parameter M and thermal radiation parameter N R for fixed value of Prandtl number Pr=6.2(corresponding to water).It was shown that the Cu-water nanofluid exhibits higher heat transfer rate as compared to Al 2 O 3-water and TiO 2-water.