Copyright © 2012 Taha Aziz and F. M. Mahomed. 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

The unsteady unidirectional flow of an incompressible fourth grade fluid bounded by a suddenly moved rigid plate is studied. The governing nonlinear higher order partial differential equation for this flow in a semiinfinite domain is modelled. Translational symmetries in variables and are employed to construct two different classes of closed-form travelling wave solutions of the model equation. A conditional symmetry solution of the model equation is also obtained. The physical behavior and the properties of various interesting flow parameters on the structure of the velocity are presented and discussed. In particular, the significance of the rheological effects are mentioned.