Eur. Phys. J. Plus (2017) 132: 158
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjp/i2017-11428-6

Regular Article

Investigation of MHD effects and heat transfer for the upper-convected Maxwell (UCM-M) micropolar fluid with Joule heating and thermal radiation using a hyperbolic heat flux equation

Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistic, Institute of Space technology, 44000, Islamabad, Pakistan

^* e-mail: drmsabeel@gmail.com

Received: 27 December 2016
Accepted: 3 March 2017
Published online: 10 April 2017

Abstract

In this article, we investigate MHD flow of micropolar upper-convected Maxwell (UCM) fluid with the application of a recently proposed hyperbolic heat flux equation thus allowing explaining the time relaxation characteristics for heat flux. The aim is to incorporate microstructural effects in the upper-convected Maxwell fluid with Joule heating and thermal radiation. In this respect, microrotation of the fluid particles is taken into account and as a result the angular-momentum balance equation is obtained. The resulting governing flow equations are transformed into their respective system of ODEs by using suitable similarity transformations. As a consequence two non-dimensional parameters arise thus accounting for microstructural effects in the UCM fluid. Effects of these microstructural parameters on macroscopic velocity, microrotations and temperature profiles are examined. Moreover, different other physical parameters for instance, Magnetic parameter, Eckert number, Prandtl number, fluid and thermal relaxation time affecting the velocities and temperature profiles are also studied and discussed in case of both classical and micropolar fluid flow. The accuracy of the numerical solution obtained by the shooting method is shown by comparing the skin friction coefficient values in the case of classical fluid flow with existing results in the literature.