Copyright © 2012 Mohamed Abd El-Aziz and Tamer Nabil. 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 effect of thermal radiation on steady hydromagnetic heat transfer by mixed convection flow of a viscous incompressible and electrically conducting fluid past an exponentially stretching continuous sheet is examined. Wall temperature and stretching velocity are assumed to vary according to specific exponential forms. An external strong uniform magnetic field is applied perpendicular to the sheet and the Hall effect is taken into consideration. The resulting governing equations are transformed into a system of nonlinear ordinary differential equations using appropriate transformations and then solved analytically by the homotopy analysis method (HAM). The solution is found to be dependent on six governing parameters including the magnetic field parameter M, Hall parameter m, the buoyancy parameter , the radiation parameter R, the parameter of temperature distribution a, and Prandtl number Pr. A systematic study is carried out to illustrate the effects of these major parameters on the velocity and temperature distributions in the boundary layer, the skin-friction coefficients, and the local Nusselt number.