Soret and Dufour effects on free convection flow of non-Newtonian fluids along a vertical plate embedded in a porous medium with thermal radiation

This article numerically studies the combined laminar free convection flow with thermal radiation and mass transfer of non-Newtonian power-law fluids along a vertical plate within a porous medium. The solution takes the diffusion-thermo (Dufour), thermal-diffusion (Soret), thermal radiation and power-law fluid index effects into consideration. The governing boundary layer equations along with the boundary conditions are first cast into a dimensionless form by a similarity transformation and the resulting coupled differential equations are then solved by the differential quadrature method (DQM). The effects of the radiation parameter R, the power-law index n, the Dufour number Df, and the Soret number Sr on the fluid flow, thermal and concentration fields are discussed in detail. The results indicate that when the buoyancy ratio of concentration to temperature is positive, N > 0, the local Nusselt number increases with an increase in the power-law index and the Soret number or a decrease in the radiation parameter and the Dufour number. In addition, the local Sherwood number for different values of the controlling parameters is also obtained.