Convective heat transfer in a conducting fluid over a permeable stretching surface with suction and internal heat generation/absorption

We consider a convective flow in a porous medium of an incompressible viscous conducting fluid impinging on a permeable stretching surface with suction, and internal heat generation/absorption. Using a similarity transformation the governing equations of the problem are reduced to a coupled third-order nonlinear ordinary differential equations. We first examine a number of special cases for which we may obtain exact solutions. We then obtain analytical solutions (by the Homotopy Analysis Method) and numerical solutions (by a boundary value problem solver), in order to further study the behavior of the nonlinear differential equations, for various values of the physical parameters. Our numerical solutions are shown to agree with the available results in the literature. We then employ the numerical results to bring out the effects of the suction parameter, heat source/sink parameter, stretching parameter, porosity parameter, the Prandtl number and the free convection parameter on the flow and heat transfer characteristics. In the absence of suction and free convection, our findings are in agreement with the corresponding numerical results of Attia [H.A. Attia, On the effectiveness of porosity on stagnation point flow towards a stretching surface with heat generation, Comput. Mater. Sci. 38 (2007) 741-745].