Effects of heat generation/absorption on natural convection of nanofluids over the vertical plate embedded in a porous medium using drift-flux model

In this paper, natural convection heat transfer over a vertical plate in a Darcy porous medium saturated with a nanofluid subject to heat generation/absorption was theoretically studied. The governing partial differential equations were transformed to a set of ordinary differential equations using similarity transformations and solved using finite difference method. The influence of parametric variation of the Brownian motionparameter, thermophoresis parameter and heat generation/absorptionparameter on velocity, temperature and nanoparticles concentration profileswas graphically shown. Impact of non-dimensional parameters on the reducedNusselt number and reduced Sherwood number was also investigated. The results showed that an increase in the heat generation/absorption parameter would increase temperature and velocity profiles; but, it would decreaseconcentration profiles. Increase of thermophoresis parameter increased magnitude of concentration profiles while not showing any significant effecton velocity and temperature profiles. The results also indicated that increase of Brownian motion parameter did not demonstrate any significant effect on the magnitude of velocity and temperature profiles. It was found that an increase in the heat generation/absorption parameter decreased the reduced Nusselt number whereas it increased the reduced Sherwood number. For negativevalues of the Brownian motion parameter, increase of the thermophoresis parameter increased the reduced Nusselt and Sherwood numbers.

Keywords:

Nanofluid , Natural convection , Porous media , Heat generation , Drift flux model