Natural convection heat and mass transfer near a vertical wavy surface with constant wall temperature and concentration in a porous medium

Abstract

This paper reports a study of the phenomenon of natural convection heat and mass transfer near a vertical wavy surface embedded in a fluid-saturated porous medium. The buoyancy effect is due to the variation of temperature and concentration across the boundary layer. A simple coordinate transformation is employed to transform the complex wavy surface to a flat plate, and the obtained boundary layer equations is then solved by the local nonsimilarity method and the cubic spline collocation method. Effects of the Lewis number, the buoyancy ratio, and the wavy geometry on the local Sherwood number and the local Nusselt number are studied. The harmonic curves for the local Sherwood number and the local Nusselt number have a frequency twice the frequency of the wavy surface. Moreover, increasing the amplitude-wavelength ratio tends to increase the amplitude of the local Sherwood number and the local Nusselt number. Further, the average Sherwood number and the average Nusselt number for a sinusoidal wavy surface are found to be constantly smaller than that of the corresponding flat plate.