Melting effect on non-Newtonian fluid flow in gyrotactic microorganism saturated non-darcy porous media with variable fluid properties

Abstract

This paper deals with the melting effect on steady mixed convection flow of a non-Newtonian fluid containing gyrotatic microorganism along a vertical plate embedded in a saturated non-Darcy porous medium. Variable fluid properties are considered in this paper to describe the variation of permeability, porosity, thermal conductivity which is approximated by an exponential function. The changed non-dimensional governing ordinary differential equations via similarity transformation characterize the flow phenomena subjected to melting surface boundary condition are solved numerically by Matlab bvp4c solver. To analyze the consequences of flow influencing parameters to the flow variables are tabulated and visualized graphically. With increasing non-Darcy and mixed convection parameters velocity profiles decays. Temperature escalates for mixed convection parameter and plunges for melting parameter. Concentration slow down for high melting effect and rises for high Lewis number. Bioconvection Lewis number and Peclet number has an increasing impact on the microorganism profiles. Mixed convection parameters show pronouncing impact on Sherwood number, Nusselt number and motile microorganism density profiles but they decrease mostly for pseudo plastic fluid. Comparisons with prior works show splendid agreement between the results.