Journal of Applied Mathematics
Volume 2012 (2012), Article ID 418527, 12 pages
http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2012/418527
Research Article

Homotopy Perturbation Method for Thin Film Flow and Heat Transfer over an Unsteady Stretching Sheet with Internal Heating and Variable Heat Flux

I-Chung Liu1 and Ahmed M. Megahed2

1Department of Civil Engineering, National Chi Nan University, 1 University Road, Puli, Nantou 545, Taiwan
2Department of Mathematics, Faculty of Science, Benha University, Benha 13511, Egypt

Received 6 June 2012; Accepted 22 July 2012

Academic Editor: Subhas Abel

Copyright © 2012 I-Chung Liu and Ahmed M. Megahed. 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

We have analyzed the effects of variable heat flux and internal heat generation on the flow and heat transfer in a thin film on a horizontal sheet in the presence of thermal radiation. Similarity transformations are used to transform the governing equations to a set of coupled nonlinear ordinary differential equations. The obtained differential equations are solved approximately by the homotopy perturbation method (HPM). The effects of various parameters governing the flow and heat transfer in this study are discussed and presented graphically. Comparison of numerical results is made with the earlier published results under limiting cases.