Comment on "The effect of variable viscosity on the flow and heat transfer on a continuous stretching surface"

Abstract

The problem of forced convection along an isothermal, constantly moving plate is a classical problem of fluid mechanics that has been solved for the first time in 1961 by Sakiadis (1961). Thereafter, many solutions have been obtained for different aspects of this class of boundary layer problems. Solutions have been appeared including mass transfer, varying plate velocity, varying plate temperature, fluid injection and fluid suction at the plate. The work by Hassanien (1997) belongs to the above class of problems, including a linearly varying velocity and the variation of fluid viscosity with temperature. The author obtained similarity solutions considering that viscosity varies as an inverse function of temperature. However, the Prandtl number, which is a function of viscosity, has been considered constant across the boundary layer. It has been already confirmed in the literature that the assumption of constant Prandtl number leads to unrealistic results (Pantokratoras, 2004, 2005). The objective of the present paper is to obtain results considering both viscosity and Prandtl number variable across the boundary layer. The differences of the two methods are very large in some cases.