The current paper scrutinized the flow dynamics of Eyring–Powell nanofluid on porous stretching cylinder under the effects of magnetic field and viscous dissipation by employing Cattaneo–Christov theory. In order to study impacts of thermophoretic force and Brownian motion, the two-phase (Buongiorno) model is considered. As a consequence, very nonlinear PDEs that govern flow problem were formulated, transformed into ODEs via relevant similarity variables, as well as tackled by utilizing R-K-45 integration scheme along with the shooting technique in the MATLAB R2018a software. Consequently, the numerical simulations reveal that Eyring–Powell fluid, curvature, velocity ratio parameters have the propensity to raise nanofluid velocity. Nanofluid temperature shows an increasing pattern with magnetic, curvature, dissipative heating, and thermophoresis parameters. Besides, Prandtl number, Eyring–Powell fluid, velocity ratio, thermal relaxation time, and porous parameters indicate the declining impact against the nanofluid temperature. Hence, the porous medium reasonably and successfully managed nanofluid temperature as well as the overall thermal system in terms of system cooling. The concentration profile gets fall down with escalating values of Schmidt number, magnetic, curvature, dissipative heating, thermophoresis, Brownian motion, and solutal relaxation time parameters. Moreover, coefficient of the skin friction gets rise for larger values of Eyring–Powell fluid, magnetic and curvature parameters however porous medium and velocity ratio parameters reveal the opposite trends on it. The magnetic, curvature, Eyring–Powell fluid, velocity ratio, and dissipative heating parameters indicate increasing impacts on both Nusselt
N
u
and Sherwood
S
h
numbers even though both
N
u
and
S
h
get cut down with the porous medium parameter. Moreover, an excellent and sound agreement was attained up on comparing coefficients of the skin friction for the current result against that of previously published literatures under some limiting cases.