This boundary condition was first proposed by Osborne Reynolds, who observed this behaviour while performing his influential pipe flow experiments.
Fluids which this condition fails includes common food-stuffs which contain a high fat content, such as mayonnaise or melted cheese.
However, by the start of the 20th century it became generally accepted that slip, if it did exist, was too small to be measured.
The stagnant layer was deemed too thin, and the partial slip was considered to have negligible effect on the macroscopic scale.
[4] While not derived from first principles, two possible mechanisms have been offered to explain the no-slip behaviour, with one or the other being dominant under different conditions.
[9] Some highly hydrophobic surfaces, such as carbon nanotubes with added radicals, have also been observed to have a nonzero but nanoscale slip length.
[10] While the no-slip condition is used almost universally in modeling of viscous flows, it is sometimes neglected in favor of the 'no-penetration condition' (where the fluid velocity normal to the wall is set to the wall velocity in this direction, but the fluid velocity parallel to the wall is unrestricted) in elementary analyses of inviscid flow, where the effect of boundary layers is neglected.
The no-slip condition poses a problem in viscous flow theory at contact lines: places where an interface between two fluids meets a solid boundary.
Here, the no-slip boundary condition implies that the position of the contact line does not move, which is not observed in reality.
Analysis of a moving contact line with the no slip condition results in infinite stresses that can't be integrated over.