AN IMPROVED APPROXIMATION TECHNIQUE TO OBTAIN NUMERICAL-SOLUTION OF A CLASS OF 2-POINT BOUNDARY-VALUE SIMILARITY PROBLEMS IN FLUID-MECHANICS

A simple and efficient approximate numerical technique is presented to obtain solutions to a wide class of two-point boundary value similarity problems in fluid mechanics. This technique is based on the common finite difference method with central differencing, a tridiagonal matrix manipulation and an iterative procedure. The technique described in this paper has been successfully applied to three different representative similarity problems of fluid mechanics. Each one of these problems is described by a coupled, non-linear system of three ordinary differential equations and has already been solved elsewhere using a different numerical method. So, the obtained numerical results, by our efficient numerical technique, permit a comparative study and show the accuracy and the effectiveness of this technique.