Consider a steady potential flow that is characterized by the velocity potential
Then
satisfies

where
, the sound speed is expressed as a function of the velocity magnitude
For a polytropic gas, we can write

where
is the specific heat ratio,
is the stagnation sound speed (i.e., the sound speed in a gas at rest) and
is the stagnation enthalpy. Let
be the characteristic velocity scale and
is the characteristic value of the sound speed, then the function
is of the form

where
is the relevant Mach number.
For small Mach numbers, we can introduce the series[3]

Substituting this governing equation and collecting terms of different orders of
leads to a set of equations. These are

and so on. Note that
is independent of
with which the latter quantity appears in the problem for
.
Imai–Lamla method
A simple method for finding the particular integral for
in two dimensions was devised by Isao Imai and Ernst Lamla.[4][5][6] In two dimensions, the problem can be handled using complex analysis by introducing the complex potential
formally regarded as the function of
and its conjugate
; here
is the stream function, defined such that

where
is some reference value for the density. The perturbation series of
is given by
![{\displaystyle f(z,{\overline {z}})=U[f_{0}(z)+M^{2}f_{1}(z,{\overline {z}})+\cdots ]}](//wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/media/math/render/svg/b6a5d5dc69f84c36c3746ba090c631af6a2b05f7)
where
is an analytic function since
and
, being solutions of the Laplace equation, are harmonic functions. The integral for the first-order problem leads to the Imai–Lamla formula[7][8]

where
is the homogeneous solution (an analytic function), that can be used to satisfy necessary boundary conditions. The series for the complex velocity potential
is given by
![{\displaystyle g(z,{\overline {z}})=U[g_{0}(z)+M^{2}g_{1}(z,{\overline {z}})+\cdots ]}](//wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/media/math/render/svg/9671d37fc801222d02fec8d9a4f0ec1dc9a24f55)
where
and[9]
