Asymptotic Expansion of Crocco Solution and the Blasius Constant

Abstract

We consider the Crocco equation (the reduction of the Blasius equation). The use of this more simple equation for computation of the Blasius constant leads to some unexpected difficulties, which have been unexplained. We computed the asymptotic expansion of the solution to Crocco equation at its singularity. This expansion was unknown before. We describe the structure of the Riemann surface of the Crocco solution at the singularity. These results were used for construction of an effective numerical algorithm, which is based on analytical continuation, for computation of the Blasius constant with an arbitrary and guaranteed accuracy. We computed the Blasius constant with a 100 decimal places.