Natural convection of thermomicropolar fluid from an isothermal surface inclined at a small angle to the horizontal

Abstract

An analysis is performed to study the skin‐friction, the couple‐stress and heat transfer characteristics of a laminar free‐convection boundary layer flow of a micropolar fluid past an isothermal plate inclined at a small angle to the horizontal. When the inclination is positive, series solutions, one valid near the leading edge and the other at a large distance from it, are obtained. Introducing a strained coordinate transformation, the local nonsimilar boundary layer equations are also derived for the flow from the leading edge to downstream, solutions of which are obtained by using an implicit finite difference method. When the inclination is negative, the boundary layer separates. The effects of the material parameters on the skin‐friction, the local couple‐stress, the local Nusselt number and the point of separation for a negatively inclined plate have been investigated.