Non-similar solution for mixed convection in a porous medium saturated with nanofluid

Abstract

Paper presented to the 10th International Conference on Heat Transfer, Fluid Mechanics and Thermodynamics, Florida, 14-16 July 2014.

This article explores the analysis of mixed convection boundary layer flow over a vertical flat plate embedded in a porous medium saturated by a nanofluid in the presence of radiation effect. The vertical plate is maintained at uniform and constant heat, mass and nanoparticle fluxes. The Darcy model is considered to describe the flow in the porous medium. The effects of Brownian motion and thermophoresis are incorporated in to the model for nanofluids. In addition, the thermal energy equations include regular diffusion and cross-diffusion terms. A suitable coordinate transformation is introduced, and the resulting system of non-similar, coupled and nonlinear partial differential equations is solved numerically by using implicit finite difference method. A comparison is made with the available results in the literature, and our results are found to be in very good agreement. The influence of pertinent parameters on the non-dimensional velocity, temperature, concentration and nanoparticle volume fraction are discussed. In addition, the variation of heat, mass and nanoparticle transfer rates at the plate are exhibited graphically for different values of physical parameters.