Non-Darcy natural convection heat and mass transfer from a vertical wavy surface in saturated porous media

This work examines the effects of spatially wavy surface and fluid inertia on the natural convection heat and mass transfer near a vertical wavy surface embedded in a non-Darcy fluid-saturated porous medium. A simple coordinate transformation is employed to transform a wavy surface to a smooth surface, and the obtained boundary layer equations are then solved by the cubic spline collocation method. Results for local Nusselt and Sherwood numbers are presented as functions of surface amplitude-wavelength ratio, buoyancy ratio, Lewis number, and modified Grashof number. The modified Grashof number is used for evaluating the relative importance of inertial effects and viscous effects. For the free convection heat and mass transfer near a vertical wavy surface, increasing the modified Grashof number tends to decrease the heat and mass transfer rate, while higher amplitude-wavelength ratio decreases the average Nusselt and Sherwood numbers. (c) 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.