Heat and mass transfer by natural convection at a stagnation point in a porous medium considering Soret and Dufour effects

Abstract

Dufour and Soret effects on flow at a stagnation point in a fluid-saturated porous medium are studied in this paper. A two dimensional stagnation-point flow with suction/injection of a Darcian fluid is considered. By using an appropriate similarity transformation, the boundary layer equations of momentum, energy and concentration are reduced to a set of ordinary differential equations, which are solved numerically using the Keller-box method, which is a very efficient finite differences technique. Nusselt and Sherwood numbers are obtained, together with the velocity, temperature and concentration profiles in the boundary layer. For the large suction case, asymptotic analytical solutions of the problem are obtained, which compare favourably with the numerical solutions. A critical view of the problem is presented finally.