Convective flow of micropolar fluid over a flat surface of another quiescent fluid

Abstract

Micropolar fluid is well known due to numerous applications such as paint, blood, liquid crystal, silicon oil and human fluids. This fluid can be defined as a fluid that contained microstructure and capable to solve fluid phenomena involving microstructure that cannot be explained by classical Navier- Stokes equation. In practical, many situations are involving two fluids with difference density such as sea water intrusion, air flow on top of water and oil spill over water occur. Despite the significance, the literature produced are still limited. Therefore, this thesis is intended to fill the research gap. Consider a lighter density of micropolar fluid is impinging orthogonally on a stretching surface of another heavier density of micropolar fluid. To solve this problem, system of dimensionless governing equations which consists of continuity, momentum, angular momentum and energy undergo scaling analysis to become dimensionless system of governing equations. Later, the similarity transformation is used to obtain the system of nonlinear ordinary differential equations and solved using shooting technique with Runge - Kutta - Gill method. The algorithm is implemented in Jupyter Notebook using Python 3 language. It is found that the result is in very good agreement with the previous work. The numerical results acquired are velocity, microrotation, temperature, skin friction and Nusselt number. The results show that stretching surface enhances the velocity and microrotation of micropolar fluid for both upper and lower fluids. It is also found that, lower fluid has a greater boundary layer thickness compared to upper fluid.