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 D_f, and the Soret number S_r 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.