Oscillatory dissipative conjugate heat and mass transfer in chemically reacting micropolar flow with wall couple stress: A finite element numerical study

High temperature non-Newtonian materials processing provides a stimulating area for process engineering simulation. Motivated by emerging applications in this area, the present article studies time-dependent free convective flow of a chemically reacting micropolar fluid from a vertical plate oscillating in its own plane adjacent to a porous medium. Thermal radiative, viscous dissipation and wall couple stress effects are included. The Rosseland diffusion approximation is used to model uni-directional radiative heat flux in energy equation. Darcy’s model is adopted to mimic porous medium drag force effect. The governing two-dimensional conservation equations are normalized with appropriate variables and transformed into a dimensionless, coupled, nonlinear system of partial differential equations under the assumption of low Reynolds number. The governing boundary value problem is then solved under physically viable boundary conditions numerically with a finite element method based on the weighted residual approach. Graphical illustrations for velocity, micro-rotation (angular velocity), temperature, and concentration are obtained as functions of the emerging physical parameters, i.e. thermal radiation, viscous dissipation, first-order chemical reaction parameter, etc. Furthermore, friction factor (skin friction), surface heat transfer and mass transfer rates have been tabulated quantitatively for selected thermo-physical parameters. A comparison with previously published article is made to check the validity and accuracy of the present finite element solutions under some limiting cases and excellent agreement is attained. Additionally, a mesh independence study is conducted. The model is relevant to reactive polymeric materials processing simulation.