Gyrotactic bioconvection flow of a nanofluid past a vertical wavy surface

•In this study numerical solutions of the bioconvection boundary layer problem has been obtained along the vertical wavy surface.•The surface is embedded in the medium filled with a water based nanofluid containing gyrotactic microorganisms.•The governing equations were transformed into non-conserved form through appropriate transformations and solved numerically.•The solutions are presented graphically particularly for soil bacterium bacillus subtilis.

In this paper bioconvection flow with heat and mass transfer of a water-based nanofluid containing gyrotactic microorganisms over a vertical wavy surface is investigated. The coupled nonlinear set of equations comprised of velocity, temperature, nanoparticle concentration and density of microorganisms is solved numerically by using implicit finite difference method. Flow characteristics are obtained in terms of skin friction coefficient, Nusselt number, Sherwood number and density number of microorganisms coefficient and are presented graphically by varying several controlling parameters. Interesting observations are recorded for the parameters: a, Nr, Lb and Rb. It is observed that the amplitude of the wavy surface has pronounced influence on the rates of heat and mass transfer, skin friction coefficient and density number of the microorganisms coefficient and all these quantities get augmented as the amplitude increases.