Effects of heat generation/absorption on natural convection of nanofluids over the vertical plate embedded in a porous medium using drift-flux model

Abstract

In this paper, natural convection heat transfer over a vertical plate in a Darcy porous medium saturated with a nanofluid subject to heat generation/absorption was theoretically studied. The governing partial differential equations were transformed to a set of ordinary differential equations using similarity transformations and solved using finite difference method. The influence of parametric variation of the Brownian motion parameter, thermophoresis parameter and heat generation/absorption parameter on velocity, temperature and nanoparticles concentration profiles was graphically shown. Impact of non-dimensional parameters on the reduced Nusselt number and reduced Sherwood number was also investigated. The results showed that an increase in the heat generation/absorption parameter would increase temperature and velocity profiles; but, it would decrease concentration profiles. Increase of thermophoresis parameter increased magnitude of concentration profiles while not showing any significant effect on velocity and temperature profiles. The results also indicated that increase of Brownian motion parameter did not demonstrate any significant effect on the magnitude of velocity and temperature profiles. It was found that an increase in the heat generation/absorption parameter decreased the reduced Nusselt number whereas it increased the reduced Sherwood number. For negative values of the Brownian motion parameter, increase of the thermophoresis parameter increased the reduced Nusselt and Sherwood numbers.