Mixed Convection Heat and Mass Transfer from a Vertical Surface Embedded in a Porous Medium

Abstract

An analysis is performed to study the heat and mass transfer characteristics of mixed convection flow along a vertical flat plate embedded in a fluid-saturated porous medium under the combined buoyancy effects of thermal and mass diffusion. The plate is impermeable and is maintained at a uniform temperature/concentration. The boundary-layer partial differential equations are transformed into a set of nonlinear ordinary differential equations using a similarity transformation and then are solved numerically using the function bvp4c from MATLAB for different values of the governing parameters. Results show that dual solutions exist for a certain range of these parameters. Very interesting analytical solutions have also been included in the paper. The results have been compared with the ones from the open literature.