MUTUAL INTERDEPENDENCE OF THE PHYSICAL PARAMETERS GOVERNING THE BOUNDARY-LAYER FLOW OF NON-NEWTONIAN FLUIDS

Abstract

We consider non-Newtonian boundary-layer fluid flow, governed by a power-law OstwalddeWaele rheology. Boundary-layer flows of non-Newtonian fluids have far-reaching applications, and are very frequently encountered in physical, as well as, engineering and industrial processes. A similarity transformation results in a BVP consisting of an ODE and some boundary conditions. Our aim is to derive highly accurate analytical relationships between the physical and mathematical parameters associated with the BVP and boundary-layer flow problem. Mathematical analyses are employed, where the results are verified at the numerical computational level, illustrating the accuracy of the derived relations. A set of “Crocco variables” is used to transform the problem, and, where appropriate, techniques are used to deal with the resulting singularities in order to establish an efficient computational setting. The resulting computational setting provides an alternative, which is different from those previously used in the literature. We employ it to carry out our numerical computations.