Thermal and mass transport analysis of solar-driven Williamson nanofluid flow over a stretching/shrinking wedge under an inclined magnetic field and heat generation

Abstract

The growing energy consumption, increasing demand for efficient cooling systems, energy preservation in clean energy technology, cooling technology, and chemical engineering, and the applications of nanofluids and non-Newtonian fluids have attracted the attention of researchers and scientists in fluid mechanics. Because this demand cannot be accommodated in current systems using fluids of low thermal conductivity, fluids such as nanofluids with high thermal conductivity are used to improve cooling systems. Therefore, the combined study of the interactions among solar radiation, heat generation, and an inclined magnetic field in a two-phase Buongiorno nanofluid model coupled with a non-Newtonian Williamson fluid model, considering shrinking and stretching wedges along a flat plate and a full wedge, was conducted in the present study. The transformed differential equations were solved using MATLAB’s bvp4c solver. The results show that increasing values of the Williamson fluid parameter, heat generation parameter, and inclined magnetic field parameter lead to a decrease in the velocity field for both the shrinking and stretching wedges along a flat plate and the full wedge under an inclined magnetic force . There is an increase in the temperature profile with increasing thermophoresis parameter and solar radiation parameter. The nanoparticle volume fraction increases with increasing values of the thermophoresis parameter for both cases of a wedge along a flat plate and a full wedge. A grid-independent test was performed to ensure that the solutions are grid-independent and that convergence of the solutions was maintained. The current results are compared with existing published results, which validates the accuracy of the present solutions.