Combined effect of viscous dissipation and Joule heating on the coupling of conduction and free convection along a vertical flat plate

An analysis is presented to investigate the influences of viscous dissipation and Joule heating in the entire thermo-fluid dynamic field resulting from the coupling of bouncy forced flow with conduction along one side of a heated flat plate of thickness W. The governing equations are transformed into dimensionless non-similar equations by using set of suitable transformations and solved numerically by the finite difference method along with Newton's linearization approximation. Numerical results for the velocity profiles, temperature profiles, skin friction coefficient and the surface temperature distributions are shown both on graphs and in tabular form for different values of the parameters. (c) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.