Commun Nonlinear Sci Numer Simulat 16 (2011) 4619–4624

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Commun Nonlinear Sci Numer Simulat

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/cnsns

Nearly parallel Blasius flow with slip

V. Kumaran a,⇑, I. Pop b
a
Department of Mathematics, National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli 620 015, Tamil Nadu, India
b
Faculty of Mathematics, University of Cluj, R-3400 Cluj, CP 253, Romania

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: The steady boundary layer flow past a moving horizontal flat plate with a slip effect at the
Available online 9 April 2011 plate in a free stream with constant speed, slightly different from the plate speed is studied.
An analytic perturbation solution of order two is obtained for the velocity. With respect to
Keywords: the parallel flow both the boundary layer and the inverted boundary layer characters of the
Boundary layer flow are plotted and discussed. It is observed that under high slip, the flow becomes a
Inverted boundary layer nearly parallel flow with an increased speed.
Slip
Ó 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Blasius flow
Constant free stream

1. Introduction

Boundary layer over a moving continuous solid surface is an important phenomenon occurring in many manufacturing
engineering processes. Specifically, these include heat-treated materials travelling between a feed roll and a wind-up roll or
materials manufactured by extrusion, glass-fiber and paper production, cooling of metallic sheets or electronic chips, crystal
growing, aerodynamic extrusion of plastic sheets, the boundary layer along a liquid film in condensation processes, etc. In
these cases, the final product of desired characteristics depends on the rate of cooling in the process and the process of mov-
ing [23,2]. Since the pioneering work of Sakiadis [22] on the boundary layer behaviour on continuous solid surfaces, various
aspects of the problem have been investigated by many authors, such as, for example, Erickson et al. [13], Tsou et al. [24],
Abdelhafez [1], Afzal [3,4], Afzal et al. [6], Afzal [5], Lin and Huang [20], Kumari and Nath [19], Chen [11], Fang and Lee [14],
Weidman et al. [27], Cortell [12], Andersson and Aarseth [8], Ishak et al. [18], etc. The problem of flow past a continuous
moving flat surface in an ambient fluid differs from that of the classical Blasius [10] problem of flow past a stationary surface.
Unlike the Blasius flow, the continuous moving surface sucks the ambient fluid and pumps it again in the downstream
direction.
During the recent years, with the rapid development of science and technology in micro- and nano-measuring technol-
ogies and related areas, it has been found that there are many significant differences between fluid flow at the macro scale
and that at the micro/nano scale, e.g., wall-slip phenomena. Rarefied gas flows with slip boundary conditions are often coun-
tered in the micro-scale devices and low-pressure situations [17]. The effects of slip conditions are very important in tech-
nological applications for some fluids that exhibit wall slip, such as for example, in the polishing of artificial heart valves and
the internal cavities. It seems that the Blasius boundary layer flow with slip flow conditions has been first studied by Martin
and Boyd [21]. It has been then extended to different situations by Andersson [7], Wang [25,26], Fang and Lee [14], Fang et al.
[16], etc. An excellent collection of papers on slip flow can be found in the paper by Fang et al. [15].
The aim of this paper is to analyse the effect of the slip flow on the steady boundary layer flow over a moving flat plate in a
parallel free stream (the limiting case of free stream speed  plate speed) using a perturbation method.

⇑ Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: sugunakumaran@yahoo.com, kumaran@nitt.edu (V. Kumaran), popm.ioan@yahoo.co.uk (I. Pop).

1007-5704/$ - see front matter Ó 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.cnsns.2011.03.045
4620 V. Kumaran, I. Pop / Commun Nonlinear Sci Numer Simulat 16 (2011) 4619–4624

2. Mathematical formulation

Consider the steady boundary layer flow past a horizontal semi-infinite flat plate, which moves with the constant velocity
 w in a viscous incompressible fluid, the ambient fluid or the far flow from the plate moves with the constant velocity u
u  e in
the direction of the plate velocity. It is assumed that the no-slip condition on the flat plate is replaced with a partial slip con-
dition of the form u  ð  w þ Að@ u
x; 0Þ ¼ u  =@ y
Þy¼0 [28], where   are the Cartesian coordinates along the plate and normal to
x and y
it, respectively, u  is the velocity component along the  x- direction and A is the slip coefficient [26]. We assume that
A ¼ ðu xÞ1=2 k, where m is the kinematic viscosity of the fluid and k is the slip parameter, which is a non-negative constant.
 w =m
pffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi ffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
We define the similarity variable g ¼ y  u  w =ð xmÞ and the stream function w ¼ f ðgÞp
xu w m, then the Navier–Stokes equations
in two dimensions under boundary layer approximations reduce to the following governing differential equation and the
boundary conditions for this problem, and are given by, (see [9]),
1 00
f 000 þ ff ¼ 0; ð1Þ
2
f ð0Þ ¼ 0; f 0 ð0Þ ¼ 1 þ kf 00 ð0Þ; f 0 ð1Þ ¼ 1 þ : ð2Þ
where we assume that  ¼ ðu 1  u  w is a small parameter (jj  1). It is instructive to see that the Eqs. (1) and (2) cor-
 w Þ=u
respond to the case of Ha = 0, m = 0 and d = 1 +  of Zhu et al. [28]. This solution also corresponds to the case of k of Fang and
Lee [14] around 1. Both the studies are dealing with the numerical solutions.
Expanding f(g) in powers of  as,

f ðgÞ ¼ f0 ðgÞ þ f1 ðgÞ þ 2 f2 ðgÞ þ Oð3 Þ; ð3Þ

and using it in (1), we get the following differential equations and the boundary conditions for f0, f1, f2 as:
1
f0000 þ f0 f000 ¼ 0; ð4aÞ
2
f0 ð0Þ ¼ 0; f00 ð0Þ ¼ 1 þ kf000 ð0Þ; f00 ð1Þ ¼ 1; ð4bÞ

1
f1000 þ ðf0 f100 þ f1 f000 Þ ¼ 0; ð5aÞ
2
f1 ð0Þ ¼ 0; f10 ð0Þ ¼ kf100 ð0Þ; f10 ð1Þ ¼ 1; ð5bÞ

1
f2000 þ ðf0 f200 þ f1 f100 þ f2 f000 Þ ¼ 0; ð6aÞ
2
f2 ð0Þ ¼ 0; f20 ð0Þ ¼ kf200 ð0Þ; f20 ð1Þ ¼ 0: ð6bÞ

Solving (4)–(6) we get,

f0 ðgÞ ¼ g; ð7Þ
1 n 2 pffiffiffiffi o
f1 ðgÞ ¼ pffiffiffiffi 2 þ 2eg =4 þ kg þ pg Erf ðg=2Þ ; ð8Þ
kþ p
2 =4
eg 2
pffiffiffiffi pffiffiffiffi pffiffiffiffi 2
pffiffiffiffi
f2 ðgÞ ¼ pffiffiffiffi f4  4k  2k p þ 2p  6ðk p þ pÞ Erf ðg=2Þ þ 4  2p þ 2 pg þ k ð4 þ pgÞ
2ðk þ pÞ3
pffiffiffiffi pffiffiffiffi pffiffiffiffi pffiffiffiffi
þ kð2 p þ pgÞ þ pð4k  4 p þ ð2  k2 þ pÞgÞ Erf ðg=2Þ  ðk þ pÞpg ðErf ðg=2ÞÞ2
pffiffiffi pffiffiffiffi pffiffiffi
þ 4 2ðk p þ pÞ Erf ðg= 2Þg: ð9Þ
Defining the dimensionless variables and quantities in the form:
xu
w u
y w 
u 
w
x¼ ; y¼ ; u¼ ; w¼ ; ð10Þ
m m w
u m
the stream line in dimensionless form takes the form w = constant, where w is the dimensionless stream function given by,

w ¼ x1=2 f ðgÞ: ð11Þ

The wall shear stress is defined as s
¼l 
@u

@y
 ¼ 0, where l is the viscosity of the fluid and can be put in the dimensionless
at y
form as s = x1/2f00 (0) with,
  pffiffiffiffi !
1 k pþp2
f 00 ð0Þ ¼  pffiffiffiffi þ 2 pffiffiffiffi þ Oð3 Þ: ð12Þ
kþ p 2ðk þ pÞ3
 V. Kumaran, I. Pop / Commun Nonlinear Sci Numer Simulat 16 (2011) 4619–4624 4621

3. Discussion

Parallel flow due to equal speeds of the plate and the free stream corresponds to the case of  = 0. In this case f(g) = g, and
is independent of the slip parameter k. The wall shear stress is also zero. In Fig. 1, the stream lines given by y = constant, the
horizontal lines in the right half of x–y plane, are plotted, which justify the name ‘‘parallel flow’’.

Fig. 1. Stream line profiles (w = c, where c is shown within the boxes) for  = 0.

Fig. 2. Profiles of f(g) for the various values of k and .

Fig. 3. Profiles of f0 (g) for the various values of k and .

4622 V. Kumaran, I. Pop / Commun Nonlinear Sci Numer Simulat 16 (2011) 4619–4624

An inverted boundary layer character is seen from Figs. 2 and 3 for  < 0, which corresponds to the case of the plate speed,
exceeding the free stream speed. In this case, the wall shear stress is negative (Fig. 4) and its magnitude decreases with an
increase in k and . From the Fig. 2, f(g) increases with an increase in g and decreases in k and the reverse is true for f0 (g) from
the Fig. 3. On the other hand an opposite behaviour is found for  > 0. A boundary layer character is also seen from Figs. 2 and
3 for  > 0, which corresponds to the case of the free stream speed, exceeding the plate speed. Also from the Fig. 3, f0 (g) in-
creases with an increase in g. Table 1 gives f00 (0) values for the various k and  values obtained by the present perturbation
solution and by the numerical solution of Eqs. (1) and (2), using the Runge–Kutta IV order method. A good agreement is
found between the values obtained by both the methods.
From the stream line profiles (Figs. 5–8), it is clear that:

(i) The curvature of the stream lines is non-zero, with an increasing slope for  > 0 and with a decreasing slope for  < 0.
The magnitude of the curvature decreases with an increase in k. In other words, for large k, the flow approaches a
nearly parallel flow with an increase in speed.
(ii) The stream lines become closer to the sheet for  > 0 whereas they are more deviating from the sheet for  < 0.

Fig. 4. Profiles of f00 (0) Vs k for the various values of .

Table 1
Numerical and perturbation f00 (0) values (P-present and N-numerical).

k/e 0.2 0.1 0 0.1 0.2

P N P N P N P N P N
0 0.1087 0.1086 0.0554 0.0554 0 0 0.0574 0.0574 0.1169 0.1169
1 0.0694 0.0692 0.0354 0.0354 0 0 0.0368 0.0367 0.0749 0.0748
10 0.0168 0.0167 0.0084 0.0084 0 0 0.0086 0.0085 0.0172 0.0172

Fig. 5. Stream line profiles for k = 0 and  = 0.2.

V. Kumaran, I. Pop / Commun Nonlinear Sci Numer Simulat 16 (2011) 4619–4624 4623

Fig. 6. Stream line profiles for k = 0 and  = 0.2.

Fig. 7. Stream line profiles for k = 10 and  = 0.2.

Fig. 8. Stream line profiles for k = 10 and  = 0.2.

4624 V. Kumaran, I. Pop / Commun Nonlinear Sci Numer Simulat 16 (2011) 4619–4624

Acknowledgement

The authors thank the referees for their valuable comments which have led to a definite improvement in the paper.

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