A note on the extended Blasius equation

In a recent paper, the Blasius equation was extended to a nonlinear equation like af''' + ff '' = 0 with the prime denoting differentiation with respect to the similarity variable eta and a being a constant parameter. The current note will show that the solution of the extended Blasius equation can be obtained from the original Blasius equation solution with a variable transformation technique. The observed phenomena in numerical solutions of previous published work are theoretically analyzed. The equation is also discussed for an arbitrary real parameter or complex parameters. It is further shown that the extended Blasius equation is a special form of the similarity equation of momentum boundary layers over a flat plate with a temperature dependent property. (C) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved..