Thermal-diffusion and diffusion-thermo effects on mixed free-forced convective and mass transfer boundary layer flow with temperature dependent viscosity

Abstract

The thermal-diffusion and the diffusion-thermo effects on the mixed free-forced convective and mass transfer steady laminar boundary layer flow, over a vertical flat plate, have been studied, when the viscosity of the fluid is assumed to vary with temperature. The partial differential equations, governing the problem under consideration, have been transformed by a similarity transformation into a system of ordinary differential equations which is solved numerically by applying an efficient numerical technique based on the common finite difference method, a tridiagonal matrix manipulation and an iterative procedure. The effects of the viscosity/temperature parameter G r the thermal-diffusion parameter Sr (Soret number) and the diffusion-thermo parameter Df (Dufour number) have been examined on the flow field of a hydrogen-air mixture as a non-chemical reacting fluid pair. The numerical results have shown that the above mentioned effects have to be taken into consideration in the fluid, heat and mass transfer processes.