Buoyant Poiseuille-Couette flow with viscous dissipation in a vertical channel

Steady combined forced and free convection is investigated in a vertical channel having a wall at rest and a moving wall subjected to a prescribed shear stress. The moving wall is thermally insulated, while the wall at rest is kept at a uniform temperature. The analysis deals with the fully-developed parallel flow regime. The governing equations yield a boundary value problem, that is solved analytically by employing a power series expansion of the velocity field with respect to the transverse coordinate. It is shown that the nonlinear interplay between buoyancy and viscous dissipation may determine the existence of dual solutions of the boundary value problem corresponding to fixed values of the applied shear stress on the moving wall and of the hydrodynamic pressure gradient. It is shown that a nontrivial fully separated flow may occur such that the hydrodynamic pressure gradient is zero and the shear stress vanishes on both walls.