NON-SIMILAR SOLUTIONS FOR NATURAL CONVECTION FROM A MOVING VERTICAL PLATE WITH A CONVECTIVE THERMAL BOUNDARY CONDITION.

In a recent paper by Makinde the effect of thermal buoyancy along a moving vertical plate with internal heat generation was considered. The plate thermal boundary condition was a convective condition with a heat transfer coefficient proportional to x-1/2. The fluid thermal expansion coefficient was proportional to x-1, and the internal heat generation was assumed to decay exponentially across the boundary layer and proportional to x-1 in order that the problem accepts a similarity solution. In the present work, the same problem without heat generation is considered, with constant heat transfer coefficient and constant thermal expansion coefficient which is more realistic and has much more practical applications. The present problem is non-similar and results are obtained with the direct numerical solution of the governing equations. The problem is governed by the Prandtl number, the non-dimensional distance along the plate and a convective Grashof number, which is introduced for the first time. It is found that the wall shear stress, the wall heat transfer, and the wall temperature all increase with increasing distance and the wall temperature tends to one. The influence of the convective Grashof number is to increase the wall shear stress and the wall heat transfer and to reduce the wall temperature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]