• SORET AND DUFOUR EFFECTS ON MIXED CONVECTION HEAT AND MASS TRANSFER WITH VARIABLE FLUID PROPERTIES

Abstract

A Numerical approach has been carried out for the study of Soret and Dufour effects on mixed convection heat and mass transfer past a vertical heated plate embedded in a Newtonian fluid saturated sparsely packed porous medium with variable fluid properties such as variable porosity, permeability and thermal conductivity. The boundary layer flow in the porous medium is governed by Lapwood-Brinkmann extended Darcy model. Similarity transformations are employed and the resulting ordinary differential equations are solved using shooting technique with Runge–Kutta-Fehlberg scheme to obtain velocity, temperature and concentration distributions. The features of fluid flow, heat and mass transfer characteristics are analyzed by plotting the graphs and the physical aspects are discussed in detail to interpret the effect of various significant parameters of the problem. The results obtained show that the impact of buoyancy ratio parameter (N), Soret number (S_r), Dufour number (D_f), Prandtl number (Pr), Schmidt number (Sc) and other parameters plays an important role in the fluid flow through porous medium. Further, the obtained results under the limiting conditions were found to be in good agreement with the existing results.