Influence of variable viscosity and nonlinear radiation on heat and mass transfer in rotating ternary nanofluid flow over a stretching sheet

Abstract

The accelerating thermal demands of contemporary energy, electronic and biomedical systems have rendered conventional working fluids inadequate for high‐flux heat dissipation. Mono‐ and binary‐hybrid nanofluids partially address this deficit, yet the synergistic potential of three dissimilar nanoparticles dispersed in a single base fluid remains insufficiently characterised, particularly under the simultaneous action of rotation, temperature‐dependent viscosity and nonlinear thermal radiation. The present investigation is motivated by this gap and seeks to quantify how a water‐based ternary nanofluid composed of copper, alumina and silver (Cu–Al₂O₃–Ag/H₂O) responds, in a rotating frame, to the coupled influence of partial velocity slip, Arrhenius activation energy, Newtonian cooling and nonlinear thermal radiation. The governing partial differential equations are reduced to a set of nonlinear, coupled ordinary differential equations through suitable similarity transformations and are integrated numerically by employing a fifth‐order Runge–Kutta–Fehlberg algorithm coupled with the shooting technique. Rigorous validation against previously reported limiting‐case solutions establishes the fidelity of the present scheme. The hydrodynamic, thermal and concentration fields are interrogated systematically with respect to all pertinent physical parameters, and the engineering quantities of interest; skin friction coefficient, local nusselt number and local sherwood number are tabulated. The numerical experiments reveal that the axial velocity is attenuated by augmentation of the slip parameter, the viscosity parameter and the nonlinear radiation parameter, whereas it is amplified by the Newtonian cooling parameter. The thermal field is enhanced by viscous dissipation, Brownian diffusion and thermophoresis, and the ternary suspension consistently outperforms its binary‐hybrid counterpart in terms of heat transport efficiency. The findings furnish quantitative guidance for the design of advanced thermal‐management devices that exploit multi‐component nanofluids.