Unsteady Free Convection Heat and Mass Transfer in a Walters-b Viscoelastic Flow past a Semi-infinite Vertical Plate: a Numerical Study

A numerical solution for the free convective, unsteady, laminar convective heat and mass transfer in a viscoelastic fluid along a semi-infinite vertical plate is presented. The Walters-B liquid model is employed to simulate medical creams and other rheological liquids encountered in biotechnology and chemical engineering. This rheological model introduces supplementary terms into the momentum conservation equation. The dimensionless unsteady, coupled, and non-linear partial differential conservation equations for the boundary layer regime are solved by an efficient, accurate and unconditionally stable finite difference scheme of the Crank-Nicolson type. The velocity, temperature, and concentration fields have been studied for the effect of Prandtl number, viscoelasticity parameter, Schmidt number, and buoyancy ratio parameter. The local skin-friction, Nusselt number and Sherwood number are also presented and analyzed graphically. It is observed that, when the viscoelasticity parameter increases, the velocity increases close to the plate surface. An increase in Schmidt number is observed to significantly decrease both velocity and concentration.