Free Convection Flow and Heat Transfer of Non-Newtonian Tangent Hyperbolic Fluid from an Isothermal Sphere with Partial Slip

An analysis is presented for the nonlinear steady boundary layer flow and heat transfer of an incompressible Tangent Hyperbolic non-Newtonian fluid from an isothermal sphere in the presence of thermal and hydrodynamic slip condition. The transformed conservation equations are solved numerically subject to physically appropriate boundary conditions using a second-order accurate implicit finite difference Keller-box technique. The numerical code is validated with previous studies. The influence of a number of emerging non-dimensional parameters, namely the Weissenberg number (W (e)), the power law index (n), Velocity slip (S (f)), thermal jump (S (T)), Prandtl number (Pr) and dimensionless tangential coordinate (xi) on velocity and temperature evolution in the boundary layer regime are examined in detail. Furthermore, the effects of these parameters on surface heat transfer rate and local skin friction are also investigated. Validation with earlier Newtonian studies is presented and excellent correlation achieved. It is observed that velocity, skin friction and the Nusselt number (heat transfer rate) are reduced with increasing (W (e)), whereas the temperature is enhanced. Increasing power (n) enhances velocity and Nusselt number (heat transfer rate) but reduces temperature and skin friction. An increase in S (f), is observed to enhance velocity and Nusselt number but reduces temperature and local skin friction. Whereas increasing S (T) is found to decrease velocity, temperature, skin friction and Nusselt number. The study is relevant to chemical materials processing applications.