<DOC>
<DOCNO>
292
</DOCNO>
<TITLE>
rapid laminar boundary layer calculations by piece-wise
application of similar solutions .
</TITLE>
<AUTHOR>
smith,a.m.o.
</AUTHOR>
<BIBLIO>
j. ae. scs. 23, 1956.
</BIBLIO>
<TEXT>
  a method is presented for the rapid calculation of the incompressible
laminar boundary layer in an arbitrary flow around
either a two-dimensional or a rotationally-symmetrical body .
the solution is obtained without recourse to von karman's
momentum equation by means of a coarse step-by-step procedure
in which each segment of the velocity distribution is approximated
by one of the falkner-skan family of similar flows .
  solutions have at least as much accuracy as those of any other
one-parameter approximate method, and in certain cases the
solutions become exact .  in regions of accelerating velocity, the
accuracy appears to be very high .  in decelerating flows, separation
is predicted somewhat early compared with exact solutions
that is, the method is conservative in contrast to the von
karman-pohlhausen procedure which sometimes fails to predict
separation that actually exists .
  the method is the most rapid hand procedure known to the
author, provided the full history of the boundary layer is required
.  if only a thickness such as is needed at one point on a
surface, then it is about equal in speed to the quadrature method .
but, if several values of or other properties along a surface are
required, it is appreciably faster than the quadrature method .
characteristically, only four steps are needed between the forward
stagnation point and the pressure peak .  once the velocitydistribution
data are available, each step in a two-dimensional
calculation requires about 5 minutes, using a slide rule .
</TEXT>
</DOC>
