Basic ideas
It might be said that the term boundary layermeans different things to different people. To someone observing fluid flowing past a flat plate, it might seem that there are two distinct regimes of motion. Far from the plate, the flow might seem too fast for the eye to follow, markers carried by the fluid appearing blurred as they speed past the plate; near the plate however the flow is so sluggish that it is easily followed by eye. The observer may call this the boundary layer, and the region beyond the free‐stream or the mainstream, and he may feel that the interface between the two is reasonably sharp, so that he can call it the edge of the boundary layer. The theoretician will see no such sharp interface but will employ a mathematical technique, sometimes called matched asymptotics that similarly distinguishes an inner region near the plate from the outer region beyond. For him, the edge of the boundary layer is a region where the two solutions are required to agree...
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Dormy, E., Soward, P.H.R.A.M. (2007). Core, Boundary Layers. In: Gubbins, D., Herrero-Bervera, E. (eds) Encyclopedia of Geomagnetism and Paleomagnetism. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-4423-6_44
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