Fascination of the shrinking sheet flow: a reality or a misconception

During the recently passed last few years, viscous flows due to continuously shrinking surfaces have become very much popular among the researchers working in this particular area. Based upon the literature published over these years, it has been established that, different from the continuous stretching surface case, the flow due to a continuous shrinking surface does not admit a meaningful solution in the absence of sufficient wall suction and does admit multiple solutions if a sufficient amount of wall suction velocity is introduced. Furthermore, it has also been believed that shrinking surface flows offer more nonlinear phenomena by exposing the “interesting” characteristics of the boundary-layer flow. Using a correct self-similar formulation for the two-dimensional shrinking sheet flow, the objective of this study is to prove that all the so-called “interesting” features of the shrinking sheet flow discovered in the previous studies are also exhibited by the stretching sheet flow. This fact consequently negates all such fascinations attributed to the shrinking sheet flow.