Rough set theory based method for building knowledge for the rate of heat transfer on free convection over a vertical flat plate embedded in a porous medium

Thermal convection and fluid flow in porous media has gained increasing research interest in recent years due to the presence of porous media in many engineering applications. Rough set theory has been regarded as a powerful feasible and effective methodology in the performance of data mining and knowledge discovery activities. This paper introduce a method for building knowledge for the rate of heat transfer (Local Nusselt Number) considering the free convection flow over a vertical flat plate in a fluid-saturated porous medium in the presence of heat sources or sinks and with nonlinear density temperature variation. First, Solutions for a class of coupled nonlinear equations are obtained by using the fourth-order Runge-Kutta method with shooting technique; second, Numerical calculations of rate of heat transfer for different parameters such as; variable suction/blowing, variable wall temperature exponent, heat source/sink, nonlinear density temperature variation (NTD) for both uniform and variable permeability cases are made and presented in tabular form (decision table). Finally, a set of maximally generalized decision rules is generated by using rough sets methodology. The effectiveness of the obtained results will be illustrated by comparing it with previously published work and are found to be in excellent agreement. The proposed method effectively decreases the time and complexity of process to obtaining the rate of heat transfer.