Influence of chemical reaction on heat and mass transfer by natural convection from vertical surfaces in porous media considering Soret and Dufour effects

The heat and mass transfer characteristics of natural convection about a vertical surface embedded in a saturated porous medium subjected to a chemical reaction is numerically analyzed, by taking into account the diffusion-thermo (Dufour) and thermal-diffusion (Soret) effects. The transformed governing equations are solved by a very efficient numerical method, namely, a modified version of the Keller-box method for ordinary differential equations. The parameters of the problem are Lewis, Dufour and Soret numbers, sustentation parameter, the order of the chemical reaction n and the chemical reaction parameter γ. Local Nusselt number and local Sherwood number variations and dimensionless concentration profiles in the boundary layer are presented graphically and in tables for various values of problem parameters and it is concluded that γ and n play a crucial role in the solution.