Solution of a viscoelastic boundary layer equation by orthogonal collocation

Summary The applicability of the method of orthogonal collocation to the solution of Newtonian and viscoelastic boundary layer problems is investigated. To this end, the method is applied to the boundary layer equation describing the flow of a second-order fluid near a two-dimensional stagnation point. The efficiency of a number of different approximating bases is investigated. It is shown that the method is applicable to both Newtonian and weakly viscoelastic fluids, and that it compares very favorably with other weighted residual methods.