A natural convective boundary layer flow with heat and mass transfer of a Cu-water nanofluid past a vertical flat plate is examined in the present paper. Electrification of nanoparticles introduced in Buongiorno’s two component non-homogeneous nanofluid model and using suitable similarity transformations, the governing partial differential equations are reduced into a system of nonlinear ordinary differential equations. The ODEs with supplementary boundary conditions have been solved numerically with shooting scheme through sixth order Runge-Kutta method. The influences of the physical parameters namely Brownian motion parameter Nb, thermophoresis parameter Nt and electrification parameter M on the temperature and concentration profiles are analysed graphically and the numerical results for reduced Nusselt number and reduced Sherwood number are presented in tabular form. Comparison with published limiting results in the literature is made and found to be an excellent agreement. It is observed that the reduced Nusselt number and reduced Sherwood number increase whereas the temperature and concentration distribution decay asymptotically for higher values of electrification parameter.

nanofluid, heat and mass transfer, Brownian motion, thermophoresis, electrification of nanoparticles.