Exact Solitary Wave Solutions and Sensitivity Analysis of the Fractional (3+1)D KdV–ZK Equation

The present paper examines a novel exact solution to nonlinear fractional partial differential equations (FDEs) through the Sardar sub-equation method (SSEM) coupled with Jumarie’s Modified Riemann–Liouville derivative (JMRLD). We take the (3+1)-dimensional space–time fractional modified Korteweg-de Vries (KdV) -Zakharov-Kuznetsov (ZK) equation as a case study, which describes some intricate phenomena of wave behavior in plasma physics and fluid dynamics. With the implementation of SSEM, we yield new solitary wave solutions and explicitly examine the role of the fractional-order parameter in the dynamics of the solutions. In addition, the sensitivity analysis of the results is conducted in the Galilean transformation in order to ensure that the obtained results are valid and have physical significance. Besides expanding the toolbox of analytical methods to address high-dimensional nonlinear FDEs, the proposed method helps to better understand how fractional-order dynamics affect the nonlinear wave phenomenon. The results are compared to known methods and a discussion about their possible applications and limitations is given. The results show the effectiveness and flexibility of SSEM along with JMRLD in forming new categories of exact solutions to nonlinear fractional models.