EFFECTS OF RADIATION AND CHEMICAL REACTION ON HEAT AND MASS TRANSFER BY NATURAL CONVECTION IN A MICROPOLAR FLUID-SATURATED POROUS MEDIUM WITH STREAMWISE TEMPERATURE AND SPECIES CONCENTRATION VARIATIONS

In this paper, the problem of coupled heat and mass transfer by a natural-convection boundary-layer flow of a micro polar fluid past a vertical flat plate in a saturated porous medium with streamwise sinusoidal variations of both the surface temperature and species concentration in the presence of thermal radiation and chemical reaction effects is investigated. A suitable set of dimensionless variables is used to transform the governing equations of the problem into a nonsimilar form. The resulting nonsimilar equations have the property that they reduce to various special cases previously considered in the literature. An adequate and efficient implicit, tridiagonal finite difference scheme is employed for the numerical solution of the obtained equations. Various comparisons with previously published work are performed, and the results are found to be in excellent agreement. A representative set of numerical results for the velocity, temperature, and concentration profiles as well as the surface shear stress, rate of heat transfer, and the rate of mass transfer is presented graphically to show interesting features of the solutions.