A Computational Analysis of the Effect of Mass and Radiative Heat Transfer on Free Convective Boundary Layer Flow over a Vertical Plate

The effects of mass and radiative heat transfer on free convective flow of a viscous incompressible optically thick fluid towards a vertical surface have been investigated. The nonlinear non-dimensional, similarity-transformed boundary-layer equations governing the problem are solved using an efficient numerical method based on the Runge-Kutta integration scheme and shooting iteration technique. Numerical calculations were carried out for different values of the various non-dimensional quantities governing the flow regime. The analysis shows that the temperature decreases with increasing radiation parameter, N while an increase in the Prandtl number leads to a corresponding decrease in the temperature profile; a rise in the thermal Grasshof and the mass transfer number leads to increase in the velocity profile and a rise in the Schmidt number Sc leads to a decrease in the concentration profile.