The forthright intention of this communication is to scrutinize the effect of variable thermal conductivity and thermal radiation on the magnetohydrodynamic tangent hyperbolic fluid in the presence of nanoparticles past a stretching sheet. For heat and mass transport phenomena, the collective stimulus of slip and convective conditions with the internal heating, viscous dissipation and Joule heating have been taken into account. The boundary layer equations of two-dimensional tangent hyperbolic nanofluid have been established with the help of boundary layer approximations. With the assistance of appropriate similarity transformation, the governing set of PDEs are rendered into the coupled nonlinear ODEs. The solution of the resulting ODEs is obtained with the help of the shooting technique. Furthermore, an authentication of the computed results is obtained through benchmark with the previously reported cases. The influence of various pertinent parameters on the velocity, temperature and concentration profiles has been analyzed graphically and discussed. The physical behavior of the velocity, temperature concentration, skin friction coefficient, the Nusselt and the Sherwood numbers have been investigated diagrammatically for various pertinent parameters. It is observed that the velocity profile is declined for the growing values of the Weissenberg number and the power law index, whereas the thermal and concentration fields are observed to enhanced for the same parameters. Our analysis depicts that the temperature and the concentration profiles are enhanced for the slip parameter and the Eckert number. Keywords Tangent hyperbolic nanofluid • Convective heat transfer • Viscous dissipation • Joule heating List of symbols Bi Biot number B 0 Applied magnetic field C Fluid concentration inside the boundary layer C p Specific heat C ∞ Fluid concentration outside the boundary layer C f Skin friction coefficient C w Concentration at wall surface D B Brownian diffusion parameter D Coefficient of mass diffusion D T Thermophoresis diffusion parameter Ec Eckert number h f Heat transfer coefficient j w Local mass flux k Thermal conductivity Le Lewis number L Slip parameter M Magnetic number n Power law index Nb Brownian motion parameter Nt Thermophoresis parameter Nu x Nusselt number Pr Prandtl number q w Heat transfer rate q r Radiative heat flux Rd Thermal radiation parameter Re x Local Reynolds number Sc Schmidt number Sh x Sherwood number T Boundary layer temperature T w Surface temperature T ∞ Ambient temperature t Time u, v Velocity components u w Characteristics velocity