Combined thermal and diffusion buoyancy effects in micropolar fluids

A regular perturbation analysis is presented for the laminar natural convection flows of micropolar fluids with temperature dependent viscosity: a freely-rising plane plume, the flow above a horizontal line source on an adiabatic surface (a plan wall plume) and the flow adjacent to a vertical uniform flux surface. While these flows have well-known power-law similarity solutions when the fluid viscosity is taken to be constant, they are non-similar when the viscosity is considered to be a function of temperature. A flow adjacent to a vertical isothermal surface is also analyzed for comparison in order to estimate the extent of validity of the perturbation analysis. The formulation used here provides a unified treatment of variable viscosity effects on those four flows. Computed first-order perturbation quantities are presented for all four flows. The velocity, microrotation distribution, temperature and concentration profiles are shown. Numerical results are presented for the local Nusselt number and Sherwood number, wall shear stress and wall couple stress.