Thermal boundary layer flow of a micropolar fluid past a wedge with constant wall temperature (Q1818658)

The author investigates a two-dimensional steady laminar incompressible micropolar fluid flow past a wedge with constant wall temperature, with the objective of examining the heat transfer characteristics and their dependence on material parameters. The problem is reduced mathematically to a system of nonlinear ordinary differential equations which was solved numerically. The results obtained are compared to their counterparts for classical Newtonian fluids. In particular, comparison is made for the distributions of dimensionless temperature and Nusselt number across the boundary layer. It has been shown that for a constant wedge angle with unit Prandtl number, the effect of increasing the viscosity ratio \(K\) results in an increased thermal boundary layer thickness. However, the heat transfer rate for micropolar fluid is lower than that of Newtonian fluid for constant \(K\). This is clearly written paper in which a standard technique leads to interesting results for micropolar fluids.