Copyright © 2012 M. Subhas Abel et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

An analysis is performed to investigate the effect of MHD and thermal radiation on the two-dimensional steady flow of an incompressible, upper-convected Maxwells (UCM) fluid in presence of external magnetic field. The governing system of partial differential equations are transformed into a system of coupled nonlinear ordinary differential equations and is solved numerically by efficient shooting technique. Velocity and temperature fields have been computed and shown graphically for various values of physical parameters. For a Maxwell fluid, a thinning of the boundary layer and a drop in wall skin friction coefficient is predicted to occur for the higher elastic number which agrees with the results of Hayat et al. 2007 and Sadeghy et al. 2006. The objective of the present work is to investigate the effect of elastic parameter β, magnetic parameter Mn, Eckert number Ec, Radiation parameter N, and Prandtl number Pr on flow and heat transfer charecteristics.