Temperature-dependent viscosity effects on non-Darcy hydromagnetic free-convection heat transfer from a vertical wedge in porous media

An analysis is presented to investigate the effects of variable viscosity and magnetic field on free-convection flow along a vertical wedge in an electrically conducting fluid-saturated porous medium in the presence of heat generation or absorption. The presence of variable viscosity of the fluid leads to the coupling and the non-linearity in the boundary value problem. The governing fundamental equations are first transformed into a system of ordinary differential equations using a scaling group of transformations and are solved numerically by using the fifth-order Runge-Kutta method with shooting technique for various values of the physical parameters. Some of the results obtained for a special case of the problem are compared to the results published in a previous work and are found to be in excellent agreement. The analysis of the obtained results showed that the drag and heat transfer characteristics as well as the velocity and temperature distribution within the boundary layer are significantly influenced by the viscosity/temperature parameter, and hence care must be taken to include the variation of viscosity with temperature in the heat transfer processes. The current study has potential applications in geothermal heat transfer and also certain industrial technological processes.