Heat transfer analysis of Cu and Al2O3 dispersed in ethylene glycol as a base fluid over a stretchable permeable sheet of MHD thin-film flow

Sci Rep. 2022 May 25;12(1):8878. doi: 10.1038/s41598-022-12671-x.

Abstract

The process of thin films is commonly utilized to improve the surface characteristics of materials. A thin film helps to improve the absorption, depreciation, flexibility, lighting, transport, and electromagnetic efficiency of a bulk material medium. Thin-film treatment can be especially helpful in nanotechnology. As a result, the current study investigates the computational process of heat relocation analysis in a thin-film MHD flow embedded in hybrid nanoparticles, which combines the spherical copper and alumina dispersed in ethylene glycol as the conventional heat transfer Newtonian fluid model over a stretching sheet. Important elements such as thermophoresis and Brownian movement are used to explain the characteristics of heat and mass transfer analysis. Nonlinear higher differential equations (ODEs) were attained by transforming partial differential equations (PDEs) into governing equations when implementing the similarity transformation technique. The resulting nonlinear ODEs have been utilized by using the homotopy analysis method (HAM). The natures of the thin-film flow and heat transfer through the various values of the pertinent parameters: unsteadiness, nanoparticle volume fraction, thin-film thickness, magnetic interaction, and intensity suction/injection are deliberated. The approximate consequences for flow rate and temperature distributions and physical quantities in terms of local skin friction and Nusselt number were obtained and analyzed via graphs and tables. As a consequence, the suction has a more prodigious effect on the hybrid nanofluid than on the injection fluid for all the investigated parameters. It is worth acknowledging that the existence of the nanoparticles and MHD in the viscous hybrid nanofluid tends to enhance the temperature profile but decays the particle movement in the thin-film flow. It is perceived that the velocity and temperature fields decline with increasing unsteadiness, thin-film thickness, and suction/injection parameters. The novel part of the present work is to investigate the hybrid nanofluid including Cu-Al2O3 dispersed in Ethylene glycol as a base fluid in the presence of a magnetic field, which has not been investigated yet. So, in limiting cases the present work is validated with published work and found in excellent agreement as shown in Table 3.