AN IMPROVED APPROXIMATION TECHNIQUE TO OBTAIN NUMERICAL-SOLUTION OF ACLASS 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 similari ty problems in fluid mechanics. This technique is based on the common finite difference method with central differencing, a tridiagonal matr ix manipulation and an iterative procedure. The technique described in this paper has been successfully applied to three different represent ative similarity problems of fluid mechanics. Each one of these proble ms is described by a coupled, non-linear system of three ordinary diff erential equations and has already been solved elsewhere using a diffe rent numerical method. So, the obtained numerical results, by our effi cient numerical technique, permit a comparative study and show the acc uracy and the effectiveness of this technique.