Numerical study of free convective MHD flow past a vertical cone in non-Darcian porous media

Abstract

A numerical study of buoyancy-driven unsteady natural convection boundary layer flow past a vertical cone embedded in a non-Darcian isotropic porous regime with transverse magnetic field applied normal to the surface is considered. The heat and mass flux at the surface of the cone is modeled as a power-law according to qw(x) = xm and q*w (x) = xn respectively, where x denotes the coordinate along the slant face of the cone. Both Darcian drag and Forchheimer quadratic porous impedance are incorporated into the two-dimensional viscous flow model. The transient boundary layer equations are then non-dimensionalized and solved by the Crank-Nicolson implicit difference method. The velocity, temperature and concentration fields have been studied for the effect of Grashof number, Darcy number, Forchheimer number, Prandtl number, surface heat flux power-law exponent (m), surface mass flux power-law exponent (n), Schmidt number, buoyancy ratio parameter and semi-vertical angle of the cone. Present results for selected variables for the purely fluid regime are compared with the non-porous study by Hossain and Paul [9] and are found to be in excellent agreement. The local skin friction, Nusselt number and Sherwood number are also analyzed graphically. The study finds important applications in geophysical heat transfer, industrial manufacturing processes and hybrid solar energy systems.