Soret and Dufour effects on free convection boundary layers of non-Newtonian power law fluids with yield stress in porous media over a vertical plate with variable wall heat and mass fluxes

This work studies the Soret and Dufour effects on the free convection boundary layers over a vertical plate with variable wall heat and mass fluxes in a porous medium saturated with a non-Newtonian power law fluid with yield stress. The governing equations are transformed into a dimensionless form by the similarity transformation and then solved by a cubic spline collocation method. Results are presented for the local surface temperature and concentration for various parameters of the power law fluid with yield stress in porous media. An increase in the power law exponent decreases the local surface temperature and concentration, thus increasing the local Nusselt and Sherwood numbers. An increase in the Soret parameter tends to increase the local surface concentration, thus decreasing the local Sherwood number. Moreover, increasing the Dufour number increases the surface temperature and thus decreases the local Nusselt number.