Mathematical Problems in Engineering
Volume 2010 (2010), Article ID 686594, 30 pages
doi:10.1155/2010/686594
Research Article

Thermal Radiation Effects on Hydromagnetic Mixed Convection Flow along a Magnetized Vertical Porous Plate

Muhammad Ashraf,1 S. Asghar,1,2 and Md. Anwar Hossain1

1Department of Mathematics, COMSATS Institute of Information Technology, Islamabad 54000, Pakistan
2Department of Mathematics, King Abdul Aziz University, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia

Received 15 October 2010; Accepted 20 December 2010

Academic Editor: Ekaterina Pavlovskaia

Copyright © 2010 Muhammad Ashraf et al. 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

Aim of the present work is to investigate the effect of radiation on steady mixed convection boundary layer flow of viscous, incompressible, electrically conducting fluid past a semi-infinite magnetized vertical porous plate with uniform transpiration and variable transverse magnetic field along the surface. The equations governing the flow magnetic and temperature field are reduced to dimensionless convenient form using the free variable transformations and solved numerically by using finite difference method. Effects of physical parameters like Prandtl number, Pr, the conduction-radiation parameter 𝑅 𝑑 , magnetic field parameter 𝑆 , magnetic Prandtl number P m , mixed convection parameter 𝜆 , and the surface temperature, 𝜃 𝑤 on the local skin friction coefficient C f 𝑥 , local Nusselt number, N u 𝑥 , and coefficient of magnetic intensity, M g 𝑥 against the local transpiration parameter 𝜉 are shown graphically. Later, the problem is analysed by using series solution for small and large values of 𝜉 , and the results near and away from the leading edge are compared with numerical results obtained by finite difference method and found to be in good agreement.