You can have a laminar boundary layer, or you can have a turbulent boundary layer. So a laminar flow is smooth and orderly, and it's like what you get when you first turn the water faucet on.

Boundary layer profiles for laminar and turbulent flow. The boundary layer over the front face of a sphere or cylinder is laminar at lower Reynolds numbers, and turbulent at higher Reynolds numbers.

Laminar boundary layers are needed to advance hypersonic flight to a new generation, according to a significant paper from NASA, the Air Force Research Lab and Case Western Reserve University ...

In a complementary approach, thermal and laminar flow over rotating spheroids has been explored, revealing how changes in body geometry affect convection and conduction within the boundary layer ...

Now the boundary layer can have two states: a smooth and steady "laminar" state, or a time-varying and chaotic "turbulent" state. The transition from a laminar to a turbulent state occurs at a ...

Figure 1. On the left, filtered Rayleigh side-view images of boundary layers at Mach 8. The flow is from left to right. The Reynolds number based on momentum thickness is about 3,600. On the right, ...

The boundary layer is the region of airflow near the surface of the vehicle. When a vehicle moves at slower speeds, the boundary layer flow is smooth, or laminar, like when you turn on a faucet at ...