On thermal stability of a reactive third-grade fluid in a channel with convective cooling the walls

Abstract

On this paper, the thermal stability of a reactive third-grade liquid flowing steadily between two parallel plates with symmetrical convective cooling at the walls is investigated. The system is assumed to exchange heat with the ambient following Newton’s cooling law and the reaction is exothermic under Arrhenius kinetics, neglecting the consumption of the material. Approximate solutions are constructed for the governing nonlinear boundary value problem using regular perturbation techniques together with a special type of Hermite-Padé approximants and important properties of the velocity and temperature fields including bifurcations and thermal criticality conditions are discussed. It is observed that a combined increase in non-Newtonian parameter and convective cooling enhances the thermal stability of the material.