Copyright © 2010 Zodwa G. Makukula et al. 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 investigate the steady two-dimensional flow of a viscous incompressible fluid in a rectangular domain that is bounded by two permeable surfaces. The governing fourth-order nonlinear differential equation is solved by applying the spectral-homotopy analysis method and a novel successive linearisation method. Semianalytical results are obtained and the convergence rate of the solution series was compared with numerical approximations and with earlier results where the homotopy analysis and homotopy perturbation methods were used. We show that both the spectral-homotopy analysis method and successive linearisation method are computationally efficient and accurate in finding solutions of nonlinear boundary value problems.