Three-dimensional stagnation flow of a nanofluid containing both nanoparticles and microorganisms on a moving surface with anisotropic slip

• The passively controlled nanofluid model has been used.
• The heat and mass transfer can be improved by adding nanoparticles into the base fluids with suspension of microorganisms.
• The slip factor affects the nanoparticles concentration and density of motile microorganisms significantly.

In this paper, we have extended Wang’s (2013) problem of the three-dimensional stagnation flow of a Newtonian fluid on a moving plate with anistropic slip to the case of a nanofluid in suspension of both the nanoparticles and microorganisms. The passively controlled nanofluid model is taken into account to describe this problem, which is believed to be physically more realistic than previously commonly used models. The problem is then reduced by a set of similarity transformations to seven coupled nonlinear ordinary equations with coupled boundary conditions. Numerical solutions are given by means of a very efficient finite difference method. The influences of various physical parameters on the distributions of the velocity, the temperature, the nanoparticle volumetric fraction, the density of motile microorganisms profiles, as well as the local skin friction coefficient, the local Nusselt number, the local wall mass flux and the local density of the motile microorganisms are presented and discussed.