Eur. Phys. J. Plus (2014) 129: 25
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjp/i2014-14025-3

Regular Article

Numerical study of thermally stratified nanofluid flow in a saturated non-Darcy porous medium

¹ Department of Mathematics, National Institute of Technology, 506004, Warangal, India
² Department of Mathematics, Indian Institute of Technology, 721 302, Kharagpur, India
³ Department of Mathematics, Aswan University, Faculty of Science, 81528, Aswan, Egypt
⁴ Manufacturing Engineering Department, Public Authority for Applied Education and Training, 70654, Shuweikh, Kuwait

^* e-mail: chittetiram@gmail.com

Received: 10 July 2013
Revised: 21 November 2013
Accepted: 9 January 2014
Published online: 6 February 2014

Abstract

In this paper, we analyze the natural convection flow along a vertical plate in a non-Darcy porous medium saturated with a thermally stratified, electrically conducting nanofluid. The non-linear governing equations and their associated boundary conditions are initially cast into dimensionless forms by local similarity variables. The resulting system of equations is then solved numerically using an implicit finite-difference method. Comparison of the numerical results is made with previously published works for special cases, and shows a good agreement. In order to explore the importance of the various physical parameters involved in this study, a parametric study of the physical parameters is conducted and a representative set of numerical results is presented through graphs.