Simultaneous heat and mass transfer by natural convection from a plate embedded in a porous medium with thermal dispersion effects

The problem of steady, laminar, simultaneous heat and mass transfer by natural convection flow over a vertical permeable plate embedded in a uniform porous medium in the presence of inertia and thermal dispersion effects is investigated for the case of linear variations of both the wall temperature and concentration with the distance along the plate. Appropriate transformations are employed to transform the governing differential equations to a non-similar form. The transformed equations are solved numerically by an efficient implicit, iterative, finite-difference scheme. The obtained results are checked against previously published work on special cases of the problem and are found to be in good agreement. A parametric study illustrating the influence of the porous medium effects, heat generation or absorption, wall suction or injection, concentration to thermal buoyancy ratio, thermal dispersion parameter, and the Schmidt number on the fluid velocity, temperature and concentration as well as the skin-friction coefficient and the Nusselt and Sherwood numbers is conducted. The results of this parametric study are shown graphically and the physical aspects of the problem are highlighted and discussed.