Effect of heat generation or absorption on thermophoretic free convection boundary layer from a vertical flat plate embedded in a porous medium

This paper is focused on the study of coupled heat and mass transfer by boundary-layer free convection over a vertical flat plate embedded in a fluid-saturated porous medium in the presence of thermophoretic particle deposition and heat generation or absorption effects. The governing partial differential equations are transformed into ordinary differential equations by using special transformations. The resulting similarity equations are solved numerically by an efficient implicit tri-diagonal finite-difference method. Comparisons with previously published work are performed and the results are found to be in excellent agreement. Many results are obtained and a representative set is displayed graphically to illustrate the influence of the heat generation or absorption coefficient, buoyancy ratio and the Lewis number on the temperature and concentration profiles and the wall thermophoretic deposition velocity. (c) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.