Viscous flow over a nonlinearly stretching sheet

An analysis is carried out to study the flow and heat transfer characteristics in a viscous fluid over a nonlinearly stretching sheet. The equations of conservation of momentum, mass, and energy, which govern the flow and heat transfer, are partially decoupled using a similarity transformation which is different from that of the linearly stretching sheet problem. (However, the results for the linearly stretching sheet problem can be obtained as a special case.) The basic nonlinear differential equation for the velocity field f and the differential equation with variable coefficient for the temperature field theta are solved numerically by using a fourth-order Runge-Kutta integration scheme. The numerical results thus obtained for the flow and heat transfer characteristics are presented by a table and graphs. Furthermore, it is shown that the heat flow is always from the stretching sheet to the fluid. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.