Abstract
Flow and heat transfer through the boundary layers of a falling liquid film on a vertical permeable plate subject to nonuniform suction flow are analyzed in this work. The continuity, momentum, and energy equations are transformed to nonsimilar equations and solved using a validated implicit and iterative finite difference method. Increases in the Froude number, Galilei number, and the dimensionless average suction velocity are found to increase the skin friction coefficient, the Nusselt number, and the heat transfer enhancement ratios. These enhancement ratios are noticed to increase at the plate exit as the suction velocity power-law index increases. The Froude number for uniform suction case required to attain the same enhancement ratios due to nonuniform distribution of this suction flow is found to increase as the Galilei number, average suction velocity, and power-law index increase. It is found that the upper most values of the enhancement factors in heat transfer and Froude number are
m
+
1
folds when the suction power-law index is equal to
m
. This work demonstrated that significant heat transfer enhancement inside developing gravity-driven liquid films is attainable when properly distributing the suction velocity along the plate.