Natural convection flow of a nanofluid over a vertical plate with uniform surface heat flux

Natural convective flow of a nanofluid over a vertical plate with a constant surface heat flux is investigated numerically, following a similarity analysis of the transport equations. The transport model employed includes the effect of Brownian motion and thermophoresis. The analysis shows that velocity, temperature and concentration profiles in the respective boundary layers depend, besides the Prandtl and Lewis numbers, on three additional dimensionless parameters, namely a Brownian motion parameter Nb, a thermophoresis parameter Nt, a buoyancy ratio parameter Nr. In addition to the study of these parameters on the boundary layer flow characteristics (velocity, temperature, nanoparticle concentration, skin friction, and heat transfer), correlations for the Nusselt and Sherwood numbers have been developed based on a regression analysis of the data. These correlations predict the numerical results with a maximum error of 5.5% for the reduced Nusselt number and 3.2% for the reduced Sherwood number.