Abstract
Based on the idea of the fractional derivative with respect to another function, a new fractional derivative operator with sigmoid function as the kernel in this article, is proposed for the first time. Then, we make use of this new fractional operator to model various nonlinear phenomena from different fields of applications in science, such as the population growth, the shallow water wave phenomena and reaction-diffusion processes, and so on. As a result, we hope that the new fractional operator can be used to discover more evolutionary mechanisms of these phenomena.