Modeling activation-energy and radiative heating effects in MHD Prandtl–Eyring nanofluid flow over a porous stretching surface for chemical and industrial heat-transfer applications

Abstract The present investigation inspects the significance of activation energy, thermophoretic diffusion, Brownian motion, and thermal radiation on an MHD Prandtl–Eyring nanofluid (NF) over a permeable stretching surface. Prandtl–Eyring nanofluids are used to improve thermal conductivity in biomedical devices, electronic cooling systems, solar collectors, and turbines. Their shear-thinning characteristics, which are non-Newtonian, allow them to enhance flow in lubrication, food processing, and polymer applications. We use the Prandtl–Eyring model because it gives a smooth and physically meaningful constitutive relation, it can be simplified to the Newtonian fluid model, and it works with the magnetohydrodynamic effects, thermal radiation, porous tmedium resistance, and nanofluid transport mechanisms. Incorporation of nanoparticles provides improved thermal conductivity, making them suitable for complex energy, industrial, and fluid control systems. Through the use of similarity transformation, the governing PDEs have been simplified to dimensionless ODEs, which allows for a great increase in the efficiency of computing. By combining the shooting iterative approach with the RKF4(5) algorithm, the resulting system is numerically resolved. Flow parameters are visually investigated with justified physical impacts in relation to Sherwood, local Nusselt numbers, skin friction, fluid concentration, temperature, and velocity. The Prandtl–Eyring fluid parameter α increases fluid velocity by diminishing viscous resistance, resulting in an expansion of the momentum boundary layer. An elevation in the activation energy parameter results in an augmentation in nanoparticle concentration within the boundary layer.