Numerical investigation of heat and mass transfer in radiative micropolar Sutterby nanofluid flow with activation energy through a porous stretching sheet

Abstract

In engineering and technology, the micropolar-Sutterby fluid serves as a favorable alternative to conventional non-Newtonian fluids due to its practical applicability, robustness, and computational efficiency. This analysis focuses on the thermophysical characteristics of the magnetized flow of a micropolar-Sutterby fluid bounded by an exponentially stretching surface, taking into account Cattaneo-Christov heat flux, thermal radiation, activation energy, and heat source, which have wide industrial applications. The surface is influenced by Darcy-Forchheimer effects and is situated within a porous medium. The impacts of mobile microorganisms with magnetic flux are also probed. Similarity transformations are used to convert the governing PDEs into coupled ODEs. The resulting ordinary differential equations are solved using the collocation-based MATLAB built-in solver bvp4c. Tables, graphs, and literature comparisons are used to demonstrate the impact of different parameters on the involved profiles. Quantitative results obtained from the numerical simulations reveal that increasing the thermal radiation parameter Rd from 0.5 to 0.9 enhances the local Nusselt number by 24.3%, while increasing the magnetic parameter Ha from 0.5 to 0.9 increases the local skin friction coefficients by 3.8% in the x-direction and 3.9% in the y-direction. Furthermore, increasing the micropolar parameter K from 0.1 to 0.5 enhances the local skin friction in the y-direction by 46.4%. It is evident from the results that the temperature field is significantly enhanced for increasing values of thermal radiation and thermophoresis.