Natural Convection Flow of a Nanofluid along a Vertical Plate with Streamwise Temperature Variations

This work is devoted to study the natural convection boundary-layer flow of nanofluids along a vertical flat plate with the effect of sinusoidal surface temperature variations. The model utilized for the nanofluid incorporates the effects of Brownian motion and thermophoresis. An appropriate set of dimensionless variables is used to transform the governing equations of the problem into a nonsimilar form. The obtained nonsimilar equations have the property that they reduce to various special cases previously considered in the open literature. An adequate and efficient implicit, tri-diagonal finite difference method is employed for the numerical solution of the obtained equations. Comparison with previously published work is performed and the results are found to be in excellent agreement. A representative set of numerical results for the dimensionless velocity, temperature and nanoparticle volume fraction, as well as the surface shear stress, rates of heat and nanoparticle volume fraction have been presented graphically and discussed to show interesting features of the solutions. (C). 2014Wiley Periodicals, Inc.