Research Article
Kandasamy R and Mohamad R
Abstract
Nanofluids have been considered for applications as advanced heat transfer fluids for almost two decades. Nanofluid is a new kind of heat transfer medium, containing nanoparticles which are uniformly and stably distributed in a base fluid.Convection in nanofluids plays a key role in enhancing the rate of heat transfer either for heating or cooling nanodevices.In this paper, we investigate theoretically the impact of a convective surface on the heat transfer characteristics of water-based nanofluids over a static or moving wedge in the presence of magnetic field with variable stream condition. The governing nonlinear partial differential equations are made dimensionless with the similarity transformations. Numerical simulations are carried out through the very robust computer algebra software MAPLE 18 to investigate the effects of various pertinent parameters on the flow field. The results show that the temperature distribution in a nanofluid in the presence of thermal radiation with magnetic field significantly depends on the surface convection parameter. This finding is new and has not been reported in any open literature.