Some aspects of laminar boundary layer flows of a special class of pseudoplastic fluids

The study of boundary layer flows of inelastic rheological fluids, particularly pseudoplastic fluids which show decrease in apparent viscosity with shear rate, has generated considerable interest due to their real life applications in areas such as polymer industry, biomedical engineering, mineral processing industry, to name a few. In such theoretical investigations, the appropriate selection of the constitutive equation of the non-Newtonian fluid model exhibiting the required characteristic becomes quite important. While certain rheological models, for instance, power-law fluid model, have received much more attention in the literature, it has been noticed that Williamson model which represents pseudoplastic behavior within a fairly large spread of shear rates, has received relatively much less attention. This project is aimed to carry out semi-analytical analysis of some specific type of boundary layer flows, e.g., two-dimensional flow near a stagnation point or over a moving boundary, using the constitutive equation of the Williamson fluid. The study will largely focus on the effect of the non-Newtonian parameter on the boundary layer flow characteristics and related quantity of engineering interest.