Numerical investigation of three-dimensional nanofluid flow with heat and mass transfer on a nonlinearly stretching sheet using the barycentric functions

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate a three-dimensional boundary layer flow with considering heat and mass transfer on a nonlinearly stretching sheet by using a novel operational-matrix-based method. Design/methodology/approach The partial differential equations that governing the problem are converted into the system of nonlinear ordinary differential equations (ODEs) with considering suitable similarity transformations. A direct numerical method based on the operational matrices of integration and product for the linear barycentric rational basic functions is used to solve the nonlinear system of ODEs. Findings Graphical and tabular results are provided to illustrate the effect of various parameters involved in the problem on the velocity profiles, temperature distribution, nanoparticle volume fraction, Nusselt and Sherwood number and skin friction coefficient. Comparison between the obtained results, numerical results based on the Maple's dsolve (type = numeric) command and previous existing results affirms the efficiency and accuracy of the proposed method. Originality/value The motivation of the present study is to provide an effective computational method based on the operational matrices of the barycentric cardinal functions for solving the problem of three-dimensional nanofluid flow with heat and mass transfer. The convergence analysis of the presented scheme is discussed. The benefit of the proposed method (PM) is that, without using any collocation points, the governing equations are converted to the system of algebraic equations.