Variational solutions for some steady and non-steady laminar viscous flows with stagnation points

Recently, Lebon and Lambermont proposed a general variational principle for fluid mechanics. In this paper, the criterion is applied to steady and non-steady stagnation flows; the plane and the axisymmetrical cases are considered. By using Glansdorff-Prigogine self consistent method, approximate analytic solutions are derived. It is shown that the steady solution is rather quickly reached. For this latter case, the present solutions are compared with previous ones obtained by direct integration of the Navier-Stokes equations.