Lecture 23, March 3, 2004

• Reminder Quiz 2 Tuesday

o Covers from the last quiz to end of Ch7

We saw last day how to reduce our mass

conservation and momentum conservation (zero
pressure gradient boundary layer equation) to single
third order ordinary differential equation. Relatively
speaking, this is very easy to solve.

Where

and

We need to set the boundary conditions on order to

solve this equation, and we will need three of them
since it is a third order equation. The no slip condition
at the wall gives us two, u(0) = v(0) = 0. The final
boundary condition comes from the edge of the
boundary layer, where u = U∞. Now, we need to
convert these boundary conditions into functions of f
and η, in order to solve the above. We need to use
the equations developed last day in order to do this.
Since,

then,

The v velocity turned out to be,

Therefor,

Finally,

so,

This last boundary condition is a little problematic for

most ‘solvers’ which require initial conditions (i.e. all
the boundary conditions at η=0).

We basically want to iterate on a boundary condition

for f’’(0) until we see that we indeed get f’’(∞)=1.

We can basically iterate on this condition until we see

the physical solution that we want. This is reflected in
the value of f’, which is the non-dimensional velocity
profile and which must approach a value of 1 as the
free stream is reached. First let us try f’’(0) = 0.

This is not too interesting. Our velocity profile is

simply all zero’s! Next let us try f ’’(0) = 1.0.
This is starting at least to look like a reasonable
velocity profile, but the final value is 2.0, which is
clearly too large. Lets try f ’’(0) = 0.5.
This is getting better – we are starting to get close.

We find that f ’’(0) = 0.332 gives us exactly asymptotic

behaviour we are looking for – f ’’(∞) = 1.0.
The next challenge is to define the edge of the
boundary layer, and hence the boundary layer
thickness. This is typically defined as the location
where . We can explore our solution to
see where this occurs.

We cab see that this occurs very near η = 5.0. Others

have investigated this in much more detail, and it is
generally accepted that the edge of the momentum
boundary layer in this flow occurs at η = 5.0. Note
though that there is some arbitrariness in this!

From the definition of η then,

Τhe edge of the boundary layer, δ, is y when η =5.0

We can simplify this, by introducing the Reynolds

number,

What about the shear stress?

We found last day that

therefore,

and f’’(0) is the boundary condition that we just figured

out to be 0.332. We shall make this non-dimensional,
We saw earlier that the average value, when the
function is of x^-1/2, is twice the local value. We
therefore know the average friction coefficient as well.

We know need the energy equation, in order to find

the functional form of the Nusselt number variation in
order to characterize the heat transfer from the plate.

To begin, we need to non-dimensionalize our

temperature.

And manipulate the energy equation as above to

obtain,
An ordinary differential equation for T, which we can
also easily solve.