Combined heat and mass transfer in natural convection flow from a vertical wavy surface in a power-law fluid saturated porous medium with thermal and mass stratification

This work studies the coupled heat and mass transfer by natural convection near a vertical wavy surface in a non-Newtonian fluid saturated porous medium with thermal and mass stratification. The surface of the vertical wavy plate is kept at constant wall temperature and concentration. A coordinate transformation is employed to transform the complex wavy surface to a smooth surface, and the obtained boundary layer equations are then solved by the cubic spline collocation method. Effects of thermal and concentration stratification parameters, Lewis number, buoyancy ratio, power-law index, and wavy geometry on the important heat and mass transfer characteristics are studied. Results show that an increase in the thermal and concentration stratification parameter decreases the buoyancy force and retards the flow, thus decreasing the heat and mass transfer rates between the fluid and the vertical wavy surface. It is shown that an increase in the power-law index, the thermal stratification parameter, or the concentration stratification parameter leads to a smaller fluctuation of the local Nusselt and Sherwood numbers with the streamwise coordinate. Moreover, the total heat transfer rate and the total mass transfer rate of vertical wavy surfaces are higher than those of the corresponding smooth surfaces. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.