Heat transfer and MHD flow of non-Newtonian Maxwell fluid through a parallel plate channel: Analytical and numerical solution

Analytical and numerical analyses have been performed to study the problem of magneto-hydrodynamic (MHD) flow and heat transfer of an upper-convected Maxwell fluid in a parallel plate channel. The governing equations of continuity, momentum and energy are reduced to two ordinary differential equation forms by introducing a similarity transformation. The Homotopy Analysis Method (HAM), Homotopy Perturbation Method (HPM) and fourth-order Runge-Kutta numerical method (NUM) are used to solve this problem. Also, velocity and temperature fields have been computed and shown graphically for various values of the physical parameters. The objectives of the present work are to investigate the effect of the Deborah numbers (De), Hartman electric number (Ha), Reynolds number (Re_w) and Prandtl number (Pr) on the velocity and temperature fields. As an important outcome, it is observed that increasing the Hartman number leads to a reduction in the velocity values while increasing the Deborah number has negligible impact on the velocity increment.