Viscous Fluid Flow Past An Impulsively-started Flat Plate

The problem of studying the behaviour of a fluid moving past a body constitutes a classical area of research in fluid dynamics. In this work, the unsteady and steady flow of a viscous, incompressible fluid past a flat plate, situated normal to the flow and started impulsively from rest, is considered. The Navier-Stokes equations and the continuity equation are formulated in terms of the streamfunction and the vorticity.;For the case of flow in an unbounded region, transformational and perturbational techniques are used to obtain exact solutions for initial and small time values. These solutions are valid for large values of the Reynolds numbers.;Finite-differencing techniques are employed in solving the problem of channel-contained steady flow of a viscous, incompressible fluid past an impulsively-started flat plate. These solutions were found to be in close agreement with experimental work done on the same problem. Calculations were carried out for small values of the Reynolds number, ranging from 5 to 20