Incompressible Flow and Heat Transfer over a Plate: A Hybrid Integral Domain-Discretized Numerical Procedure

Abstract

This work deals with incompressible two-dimensional viscous flow over a semi-infinite plate according to the approximations resulting from Prandtl boundary layer theory. The governing nonlinear coupled partial differential equations describing laminar flow are converted to a self-similar type third order ordinary differential equation known as the Falkner-Skan equation. For the purposes of a numerical solution, the Falkner-Skan equation is converted to a system of first order ordinary differential equations. These are numerically addressed by the conventional shooting and bisection methods coupled with the Runge-Kutta technique. However the accompanying energy equation lends itself to a hybrid numerical finite element-boundary integral application. An appropriate complementary differential equation as well as the Green second identity paves the way for the integral representation of the energy equation. This is followed by a finite element-type discretization of the problem domain. Based on the quality of the results obtained herein, a strong case is made for a hybrid numerical scheme as a useful approach for the numerical resolution of boundary layer flows and species transport. Thanks to the sparsity of the resulting coefficient matrix, the solution profiles not only agree with those of similar problems in literature but also are in consonance with the physics they represent.