Effects of Internal Heat Generation and Variable Fluid Properties on Mixed Convection Past a Vertical Heated Plate

Abstract

Heat and Mass transfer from a vertical heated plate embedded in a sparsely packed porous medium with internal heat generation and variable fluid properties like permeability, porosity and thermal conductivity has been investi- gated numerically. In particular, the governing highly non-linear coupled partial differential equations are transformed into a system of ordinary differential equa- tions with the help of similarity transformations and solved numerically by using a shooting algorithm based on a Runge-Kutta-Fehlberg scheme and a Newton Raph- son method (to obtain velocity, temperature and concentration distributions). The heat and mass transfer characteristics are analyzed and related physical aspects are discussed in detail to interpret the effect of the various significant problem parame- ters. The results show that the buoyancy ratio number, Prandtl number Pr, Schmidt number Sc and other parameters play an important role. The obtained results are compared with previously published works and they are found to be in very good agreement. The effects of the considered parameters on the local skin friction coef- ficient (viscous drag), Nusselt number (rate of heat transfer) and Sherwood number (rate of mass transfer) are also discussed.