Blasius Solution

The Blasius solution is the solution of the Blasius differential equation

(1)

on satisfying the boundary conditions

(2)

and

(3)

It describes the boundary layer of a steady flow past a flat plate, with giving the normalized velocity profile (Childress 2008, §8.2). The name specifies this boundary value problem, not an arbitrary solution of the Blasius differential equation.

The scaling of the Blasius differential equation reduces the computation to an initial value problem. Let satisfy the same differential equation with and , and set . Then

(4)

so (Childress 2008, p. 124).