Copyright © 2012 Swati Mukhopadhyay and Anuar Ishak. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

An analysis for the axisymmetric laminar boundary layer mixed convection flow of a viscous and incompressible fluid towards a stretching cylinder immersed in a thermally stratified medium is presented in this paper. Similarity transformation is employed to convert the governing partial differential equations into highly nonlinear ordinary differential equations. Numerical solutions of these equations are obtained by a shooting method. It is found that the heat transfer rate at the surface is lower for flow in a thermally stratified medium compared to that of an unstratified medium. Moreover, both the skin friction coefficient and the heat transfer rate at the surface are larger for a cylinder compared to that for a flat plate.