UNSTEADY MAGNETOHYDRODYNAMIC CONVECTIVE BOUNDARY LAYER FLOW ALONG A VERTICAL PLATE FOR VARIOUS PHYSICAL AND BOUNDARY CONDITIONS

The study of natural convection along a vertical plate is of great interest in many applications ranging from small electronic components to huge nuclear reactors. Moreover, with the rising demands of modern technology, nanofluids have potential applications in various fields of heat transfer such as industrial coolants, smart fluids, nuclear reactors coolant, extraction of geothermal power, nanofluids in automobile fuels, brake fluids, car radiator coolant, microelectronics cooling, bio, and pharmaceutical industry. This thesis is focused on the investigation of an unsteady magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) natural convective boundary-layer flow along a vertical plate for various physical and boundary conditions. The boundary layer analysis is employed and the resulting dimensionless coupled linear partial differential equations are solved using the Laplace transform technique and the non-linear partial differential equations are solved by Crank–Nicolson implicit finite-difference method. Numerical results are presented in graphs to show the effects of the pertinent controlling parameters on the dimensionless velocity, temperature, and concentration profiles as well as on the skin-friction, rate of heat and mass transfer. The influence of the thermal Grashof number, mass Grashof number, magnetic field parameter, Prandtl number, heat generation/absorption parameter, Dufour number, Schmidt number, chemical reaction parameter, Soret number, radiation parameter, viscous dissipation, and Joule heating are discussed in detail. It is observed that an increase in the Soret number and radiation parameter leads to decrease in the rate of mass transfer whereas, the rate of heat transfer decreases with increasing Dufour number and Schmidt number. The rate of heat transfer decreases with increasing magnetic field while it increases with increasing nanoparticle volume fraction. Further, it is noticed that the copper-water nanofluid exhibits a higher heat transfer rate as compared to the silver-water nanofluid for transient free convection nanofluid flow along a semi-infinite vertical plate.