Free convection on an inclined plate with variable viscosity and thermal diffusivity

The present numerical analysis addresses free convection flow of a viscous incompressible fluid along an inclined semi-infinite flat plate considering the variation of viscosity and thermal diffusivity with temperature. The governing equations are developed with the corresponding boundary conditions are transformed to non-dimensional form using the appropriate dimensionless quantities. Due to complexity in the transformed governing equations, analytical solution will fail to produce a solution. Hence, most efficient and unconditionally stable implicit finite difference method of Crank-Nicolson scheme has been used to solve the governing equations. Numerical results are obtained for different values of the viscosity, thermal conductivity, inclination angle, Grashof number, and Prandtl number. The overall investigation of the variation of velocity, temperature, shearing stress and Nusselt number are presented graphically. To examine the accuracy of the present approximate results, the present results are compared with the available results.