Abstract

This study investigates the effects of dissipation, radiation, Dufor, Soret, heat and mass transfer on a laminar free convective flow of a viscous incompressible, electrically conducting chemically reacting fluid past an impulsively started moving plate adjacent to non-Darcy porous regime in the presence of heat generation. The governing equations are reduced to two-dimensional and two dependent problems involving velocity, temperature, and concentration with appropriate boundary conditions. The Rosseland diffusion approximation was used to analyze the radiative flux in the energy equation which is appropriate for non-scattering media. The governing equations for the model were simplified and nondimensionalised using dimensionless quantities. The dimensionless governing equations were solved using an implicit finite-difference method of Crank-Nicolson type. A parametric study was performed to illustrate the influence of emerging thermophysical parameters on the velocity, temperature and concentration profiles. The local and average Nusselt number, Sherwood number and Skin-friction are presented graphically. The results obtained were compared with previously published ones and found to be in excellent agreement. This study is applicable in transport of fires in porous media (forest fires), in the design of high temperature chemical processing systems and solar energy systems.