Impact of temperature-dependant viscosity and thermal conductivity on MHD boundary layer flow of two-phase dusty fluid through permeable medium

Abstract The distribution of solid particles in a fluid leading to two-phase nature as in micro-propulsion, aerosol filtration, conveying of powdered materials, petroleum industry and lunar ash flow can be described as an open question. In this study, boundary layer flow of an electrically conducting magnetohydrodynamic dusty fluid in a porous medium is presented. Fluid viscosity and thermal conductivity are assumed to be an inverse linear function of temperature. The governing nonlinear partial differential equations and their physically realistic boundary conditions are reduced into dimensionless form by using appropriate transformations. The resultant coupled system of equations is discretized using finite difference scheme and Thomas algorithm is implemented to solve the linear algebraic equation. A representative set of numerical results are plotted to visualize the impact of existing fluid interaction parameters. Skin-friction, heat and mass transfer coefficients are tabulated and results obtained are in good agreement with the literature. From this investigation, velocity, temperature and concentration fields are observed to be an increasing function in accordance with the raise in both viscosity variation parameter ( θ r ) and thermal conductivity variation parameter ( θ c ). This computation illustrates that the friction factor coefficient is found to be less for low thermal expansion coefficient irrespective of all emerging parameters of the flow. Furthermore, enhancement in θ r reduces the heat transfer rate and strengthens the mass transfer rate whereas the reverse trend is observed for θ c .