Convective heat transfer in ternary nanofluids over stretching sheets under radiation and slip conditions

The use of Ternary nanofluids (T-NFs) has been under consideration in a wide range of industrial, energy systems (microelectronic cooling, solar thermal energy systems, nuclear reactors, etc.) and even biomedical applications (targeted drug delivery) due to their high thermal conductivities and suspension stabilities. Motivated by these applications, we shift our attention to investigating the joint effects of radiative flux, mixed convection, and velocity–thermal slip on the transport features of a ternary nanofluid over a stretching sheet. Brownian diffusion, thermophoresis, and inconstant thermal conductivity effects are considered in the analysis, resulting in a set of nonlinear PDEs. These equations are converted into ordinary differential equations (ODEs) by means of similarity transformations and solved numerically through MATLAB bvp4c solver. It is found that the fluid velocity decreases with an increase in the velocity slip parameter, whereas it increases with the temperature slip parameter. Furthermore, the radiation parameter increases thermal structures, which shows more effective heat transfer. In a numerical aspect, a 30 % elevation of the response to the velocity slip parameter decreases the near-wall velocity by around 18 %, whereas an equivalent magnitude of the radiation parameter enhances the temperature by more or less 12 %.