Soret and Dufour effects on MHD mixed convective unsteady flow over stretching sheet with variable fluid properties and convective boundary condition

In several industrial and engineering applications, variable fluid properties play a major role in flow and heat transport processes. The goal of this communication is to analyse the Soret and Dufour effects for an unsteady MHD flow past a stretching sheet under the influence of temperature-dependent viscosity and thermal conductivity along with the convective boundary condition. The governing partial differential equations are transformed into nonlinear coupled ordinary differential equations with the help of similarity transformations, and a numerical analysis is done by using bvp4c, MATLAB’s built-in solver. The flow properties and heat transfer characteristics have been depicted graphically and numerically. Results show that the wall temperature gradient improves by about 8.5%, while the temperature of the fluid near the stretching sheet significantly improves upon increasing the Biot number. Employing fluids with higher viscosity and thermal conductivity consequently leads to a reduction of the wall temperature gradient by about 0.3% and 10.7%, respectively. Also, as the unsteadiness parameter increases, the wall-skin friction, heat and mass transfer rates significantly rise by about 10.4%, 4.4%, and 9.8%, respectively. Further, to verify the accuracy of the generated results, the computed results have been compared with published literature.