Diffusion of chemically reactive species of a non-Newtonian fluid immersed in a porous medium over a stretching sheet

The influence of reaction rate on the transfer of chemically reactive species in the laminar visco-elastic fluid flow immersed in a porous medium over a stretching sheet is considered. The flow is caused solely by the linearly stretching sheet and the reactive species is emitted from this sheet and undergoes an isothermal and homogeneous one-stage reaction as it diffuses into the surrounding fluid. A similarity transformation is introduced, which reduces the concentration conservation equation to an ordinary differential equation. An exact analytical solution due to Siddappa and Abel (Z. Angew. Math. Phys. 36 (1985) 890) is adopted for velocity, where as the concentration equation is obtained numerically for higher-order reactions. The numerical computations show that the effect of destructive chemical reaction is to reduce the thickness of concentration boundary layer and increase the mass transfer rate from the sheet to the surrounding fluid. This effect is more effective for zero- and first-order reaction than second- and third-order reactions. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.