Natural convection on vertical and horizontal plates with vectored surface mass transfer

Abstract

An analysis is performed to study the flow and heat transfer characteristics of laminar free convection on isothermal vertical and horizontal flat plates with uniform vectored surface mass transfer. The governing equations are first cast into a dimensionless form by a nonsimilar transformation and the resulting equations are then solved by a finite difference method. Numerical results for gases with a Prandtl number of 0.7 are presented for representative values of the normal and streamwise components of the uniform surface mass transfer. For both vertical and horizontal plates, it has been found that an increase in the normal injection ( v w>0) results in a decrease in the local surface heat transfer rate for both downstream vectoring ( u w>0) and upstream vectoring ( u w>0). On the other hand, an increase in the normal suction ( v w>0) results in an increase in the local surface heat transfer rate. For a given value of the normal injection or suction parameter, an increase in the downstream vectoring increases the local surface heat transfer rate and decreases the local wall shear stress. The opposite is true for the case of increasing upstream vectoring. No experimental data are available for comparison.