Blasius boundary layer

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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-

However the semi-infinite plate has no natural length scale

dimensional boundary-layer equations for continuity and momentum are

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.

This suggests adopting the similarity variable

and writing

It proves convenient to work with the stream function

, 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

can then be computed. The numerical solution gives

FalknerSkan boundary layer[edit]

We can generalize the Blasius boundary layer by considering a wedge at an angle of attack from some uniform velocity field . We then estimate the

outer flow to be of the form:

Where

is a characteristic length and m is a dimensionless constant. In the

Blasius solution, m = 0 corresponding to an angle of attack of zero radians. Thus we can write:

As in the Blasius solution, we use a similarity variable Stokes Equations.

to solve the Navier-

It becomes easier to describe this in terms of its stream function which we write as

Thus the initial differential equation which was written as follows:

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]).

(note that Wilcox 2007.

produces the Blasius equation). See

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.