Solute transport and heat transfer in single-phase flow in porous medium with generative/destructive chemical reaction and variable viscosity impacts

In this paper we study the combined free convection, due to thermal and species diffusion, of a viscous incompressible non Newtonian fluid over a vertical plate embedded in a saturated porous medium with three thermal states of the surface and a constant concentration in the presence of a chemical reaction. The effect of temperature dependent viscosity is also investigated. The Ostwald-de Waele power-law model is used to characterize the non-Newtonian fluid behavior. The governing boundary layer equations along with the boundary conditions are first cast into a dimensionless form by a unique similarity transformation and the resulting coupled differential equations are then solved numerically by a computational program based on the fifth order Runge-Kutta scheme with shooting iteration technique. The results are illustrated and the physical aspect is discussed for temperature and concentration profiles, as well as the Nusselt and Sherwood numbers for various values of the parameters, which govern the problem. © 2017, Global Digital Central. All rights reserved.