Numerical solution of the momentum and heat transfer equations for a hydromagnetic flow due to a stretching sheet of a non-uniform property micropolar liquid

Abstract

A study of the hydromagnetic flow due to a stretching sheet and heat transfer in an incompressible micropolar liquid is made. Temperature-dependent thermal conductivity and a non-uniform heat source/sink render the problem analytically intractable and hence a numerical study is made using the shooting method based on Runge-Kutta and Newton-Raphson methods. The two problems of horizontal and vertical stretching are considered to implement the numerical method. The former problem involves one-way coupling between linear momentum and heat transport equations and the latter involves two-way coupling. Further, both the problems involve two-way coupling between the non-linear equations of conservation of linear and angular momentums. A similarity transformation arrived at for the problem using the Lie group method facilitates the reduction of coupled, non-linear partial differential equations into coupled, non-linear ordinary differential equations. The algorithm for solving the resulting coupled, two-point, non-linear boundary value problem is presented in great detail in the paper. Extensive computation on velocity and temperature profiles is presented for a wide range of values of the parameters, for prescribed surface temperature (PST) and prescribed heat flux (PHF) boundary conditions. © 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.