Flow and heat transfer characteristics of a viscoelastic fluid over a stretching sheet embedded in a porous medium with meshfree approach

Abstract

In this article, the flow and heat transfer characteristics in an incompressible, non-Newtonian boundary layer flow of a viscoelastic fluid over a stretching sheet embedded in a porous medium with variable fluid viscosity and thermal conductivity including the eff ect of viscous dissipation has been examined. The fluid viscosity and thermal conductivity are assumed to be temperature dependent. Unlike the commonly employed thermal conditions of critical and prescribed surface temperature, the present study uses a convective heating boundary condition also along with the prescribed surface temperature condition. The di erential equations governing the problem have been transformed by a similarity transformation into a system of non-dimensional di erential equations which are solved numerically by Element Free Galerkin Method (EFGM). The e ect of various physical parameters like variable fluid viscosity, thermal conductivity, heat source/sink parameter, viscoelastic parameter, porosity parameter, Eckert number, Biot number on velocity, temperature, local skin friction and local heat transfer is studied for both the cases Prescribed Surface Temperature (PST) and Newtonian heating (NH) or convective heating. The present problem nds signi cant application in chemical engineering, material processing, solar porous wafer absorber systems and metallurgy.