Flow and heat transfer of a nanofluid over a nonlinearly stretching sheet: A numerical study

Steady, laminar boundary fluid flow which results from the non-linear stretching of a flat surface in a nanofluid has been investigated numerically. The model used for the nanofluid incorporates the effects of Brownian motion and thermophoresis. The resulting non-linear governing equations with associated boundary conditions are solved using variational finite element method (FEM) with a local non-similar transformation. The influence of Brownian motion number (Nb), thermophoresis number (Nt), stretching parameter (n) and Lewis number (Le) on the temperature and nanoparticle concentration profiles are shown graphically. The impact of physical parameters on rate of heat transfer (-0'(0)) and mass transfer (-phi'(0)) is shown in tabulated form. Some of results have also been compared with explicit finite difference method (FDM). Excellent validation of the present numerical results has been achieved with the earlier nonlinearly stretching sheet problem of Cortell [16] for local Nusselt number without taking the effect of Brownian motion and thermophoresis. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.