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In physics and fluid mechanics, a Blasius boundary layer (named after Paul Richard Heinrich Blasius) describes the steady two-dimensional boundary layer that forms on a semi-infinite plate which is held parallel to a constant unidirectional flow .
A schematic diagram of the Blasius flow profile. The streamwise velocity component function of the stretched co-ordinate .
is shown, as a
The solution to the NavierStokes equation for this flow begins with an order-of-magnitude analysis to determine what terms are important. Within the boundary layer the usual balance between viscosity and convective inertia is struck, resulting in the scaling argument
, where is the boundary-layer thickness and is the kinematic viscosity. and so the steady, incompressible, two-
Continuity:
x-Momentum: (note that the x-independence of has been accounted for in the boundary-layer equations) admit a
similarity solution. In the system of partial differential equations written above it is assumed that a fixed solid body wall is parallel to the x-direction whereas the y-direction is normal with respect to the fixed wall, as shown in the above schematic. and denote here the x- and y-components of the fluid velocity
vector. Furthermore, from the scaling argument it is apparent that the boundary layer grows with the downstream coordinate , e.g.
and writing
, in which case
and on differentiating, to find the velocities, and substituting into the boundary-layer equation we obtain the Blasius equation
subject to
on
and
as
. This non-
linear ODE can be solved numerically, with the shooting method proving an effective choice. The shear stress on the plate
Where
Blasius solution, m = 0 corresponding to an angle of attack of zero radians. Thus we can write:
It becomes easier to describe this in terms of its stream function which we write as
Can now be expressed in terms of the non-linear ODE known as the FalknerSkan equation (named after V. M. Falkner and Sylvia W. Skan[1]).
In 1937 Douglas Hartree revealed that physical solutions exist only in the range . Here,
m<0 corresponds to an adverse pressure gradient (often resulting in boundary layer separation) while m > 0 represents a favorable pressure gradient.