Abstract
An analysis is presented to investigate the effects of chemical reaction, thermal radiation and heat generation or absorption on unsteady free convective heat and mass transfer along an infinite vertical porous plate in the presence of a transverse magnetic field and Hall current. The governing partial differential equations are formulated and transformed by using a similarity transformation into a system of ordinary differential equations. The resulting equations are solved numerically using a fourth-order Runge-Kutta scheme along with the shooting method. The Rosseland approximation is used to describe the radiative heat flux in the energy equation. Numerical results for the velocity, temperature and concentration distributions are shown graphically for different parametric values. The effects of parameters on the local friction coefficients, the Nusselt number and Sherwood numbers are depicted in tabulated form. Copyright (C) 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.