Natural convection from an inclined plate embedded in a variable porosity porous medium due to solar radiation

Natural convection boundary-layer flow of an absorbing and electrically-conducting fluid over a semi-infinite, ideally transparent, inclined flat plate embedded in a porous medium with variable porosity due to solar radiation is considered. The governing equations are derived using the usual boundary-layer and Boussinesq approximations and accounting for the presence of an applied magnetic field and an applied incident radiation flux. To account for the heat loss from the plate surface, a convective-type boundary condition is employed there. These equations and boundary conditions are non-dimensionalized and transformed using a non-similarity transformation. The resulting non-linear partial differential equations are then solved numerically subject to the transformed boundary conditions by an implicit iterative finite-difference scheme. Graphical results for the velocity and temperature fields as well as the boundary friction and Nusselt number are presented and discussed for various parametric conditions.

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