Mathematical Analysis of a Navier–Stokes Model with a Mittag–Leffler Kernel

In this paper, we establish the existence and uniqueness results of the fractional Navier–Stokes (N-S) evolution equation using the Banach fixed-point theorem, where the fractional order β is in the form of the Atangana–Baleanu–Caputo fractional order. The iterative method combined with the Laplace transform and Sumudu transform is employed to find the exact and approximate solutions of the fractional Navier–Stokes equation of a one-dimensional problem of unsteady flow of a viscous fluid in a tube. In the domains of science and engineering, these methods work well for solving a wide range of linear and nonlinear fractional partial differential equations and provide numerical solutions in terms of power series, with terms that are simple to compute and that quickly converge to the exact solution. After obtaining the solutions using these methods, we use Mathematica software Version 13.0.1.0 to present them graphically. We create two- and three-dimensional plots of the obtained solutions at various values of β and manipulate other variables to visualize and model relationships between the variables. We observe that as the fractional order β becomes closer to the integer order 1, the solutions approach the exact solution. Lastly, we plot a 2D graph of the first-, second-, third-, and fourth-term approximations of the series solution and observe from the graph that as the number of iterations increases, the approximate solutions become close to the series solution of the fourth-term approximation.