Copyright © 2010 N. S. Kobo and O. D. Makinde. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

This study investigates the inherent irreversibility associated with the Couette flow of a reacting variable viscosity combustible material under Arrhenius kinetics. The nonlinear equations of momentum and energy governing the flow system are solved both analytically using a perturbation method and numerically using the standard Newton Raphson shooting method along with a fourth-order Runge Kutta integration algorithm to obtain the velocity and temperature distributions which essentially expedite to obtain expressions for volumetric entropy generation numbers, irreversibility distribution ratio, and the Bejan number in the flow field.