Modeling and analysis of modern fluid problems (Q343691)

The contents of this book are as follows: 1. Introduction, 2. Embedding-parameters perturbation method, 3. Adomian decomposition method, 4. Homotopy analytical method, 5. Differential transform method, 6. Variational iteration method and homotopy perturbation method, 7. Exact analytical solutions for fractional viscoelastic fluids, 8. Numerical methods. Each chapter ends with a section of references, and the book as a whole is equipped with an index. We notice that the book collects an interesting and quite large set of problems which can be considered as benchmarks. The authors focus on the flow, heat and mass transfer of various non-Newtonian fluids (power law, Bingham, Oldroyd-B, Maxwell, etc.). All these problems are modelled as initial/boundary value problems attached to ODEs or PDEs. Generally, these problems are nonlinear. The presentation is far from being self-contained. The various problems are simply stated and no motivations about their particular interest or difficulty are provided. Thus the book will be of interest at most to readers already very familiar with the considered topics. In order to solve the posed problems, the authors essentially use two classes of methods, namely, series solutions and numerical methods. Actually, all perturbation methods, Adomian decomposition, homotopy and differential transform methods, ultimately reduce to a series solution method. In the reviewer's opinion, the pros/cons with respect to these methods are not properly discussed. Additionally, the authors do not comment at all on the behavior (convergence) of the series solutions carried out using the above mentioned methods. Instead, the volume is full of huge and rather tedious series expansions for the large majority of solutions. The text also abounds with passages of several pages containing only figures and tables with no accompanying comments. The principal numerical method is shooting based on the fourth-order Runge-Kutta finite difference scheme. This method is rather obsolete in solving two-point boundary value problems. Moreover, the authors do not pay attention to the principal mathematical aspects, i.e., convergence, stability and reliability, of these solutions. The fluid mechanics problems could be, or more exactly have been, of some interest from the technological point of view. In any case, the analytical as well as numerical methods used in this book have clearly been overcome in practice by modern effective high-order methods (mainly, spectral, finite differences and finite elements).