DIFFUSION OF CHEMICALLY REACTIVE SPECIES IN BOUNDARY LAYER FLOW OVER A POROUS PLATE IN POROUS MEDIUM

Abstract

Analysis was made to study the effect of diffusion of chemically reactive species in boundary layer flow of an incompressible fluid over a porous flat plate in porous medium. The first-order chemical reaction was considered and the reaction rate of the reactive species was taken in such a manner that it varied inversely along the plate. Self-similar equations were obtained using similarity transformations and were then solved by the shooting technique using the fourth-order Runge-Kutta method. This analysis revealed that at a fixed point, with increase of the permeability of the porous medium the velocity increases, but the concentration decreases. The suction reduces the thicknesses of momentum and concentration boundary layers but due to blowing the thicknesses become larger. With increase of both the Schmidt number and the reaction rate parameter, the reactive concentration profiles decrease. For a destructive chemical reaction, the concentration profiles exhibit negative value when the Schmidt number is large. It is very significant to note that in some constructive chemical reaction cases the mass absorption at the plate occurs for small Schmidt number.

Keywords:

• Boundary layer flow
• Chemically reactive species
• Diffusion
• Porous medium
• Porous plate
• Suction or blowing

Acknowledgments

The authors are thankful to the reviewers for their constructive and valuable suggestions to improve the quality of the article. One of the authors (K. Bhattacharyya) gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the National Board for Higher Mathematics (NBHM), DAE, Mumbai, India for pursuing this work.