Fluid Flow & Aerodynamics
why things fly, and why the usual explanation is wrong
Concept

Matched asymptotics — where it appears

A method for problems with two regions governed by different balances, solving each in its own variables and requiring the two to agree in an overlap. It is what fixes Stokes' law far from a sphere and what produces the logarithm in the turbulent overlap layer.

Named by 8 essays across 5 fields — each of them below, with the objects they name alongside it.

The plateau that is the log law. y⁺ du⁺/dy⁺ across a channel, at five Reynolds numbers. Millikan's argument says this quantity must be constant wherever neither the viscous length nor the channel width may appear, and its value there is 1/κ. At Re_τ = 180 there is no flat part at all; at Re_τ = 100,000 it is flat over 2.16 decades and gives κ = 0.4120. The log law is a statement about a limit, and this is the picture of the flow approaching it.

The layer with no length in it

The logarithm in a turbulent wall profile does not come from any model of turbulence. It comes from a region where neither of the flow's two lengths is allowed to appear, and where a velocity gradient therefore has nothing to depend on but the distance to the wall. The constant in it has never been derived from anything.

turbulence · Wall law How small is small enough. The error in Stokes' law for the drag on a sphere, against the Reynolds number, both logarithmic. Oseen's correction is the first term the neglected inertia puts back, and it says the error is 3Re/16: one per cent at Re = 16/297 = 0.054, five per cent at 0.28, and already sixteen per cent at Re = 1 — which is the value at which the two terms the Reynolds number compares are equal, and is where every textbook draws the boundary of creeping flow.

How small is small enough

Creeping flow drops the inertia terms and gets an exact answer for the drag on a sphere. The Reynolds number at which those terms are equal is one — and at one, Stokes' law is already sixteen per cent low. The honest boundary is 0.054, and the reason it is so far down is the same reason the theory needed repairing in the first place.

regimes · Reynolds Twice as fast is not twice as thick. The film a plate carries out of water, against the speed it is withdrawn at, both logarithmic. The slope is exactly two-thirds, so doubling the speed thickens the film by 58.7 per cent and never by more. The open marks are outside the range the derivation holds in — above a capillary number of about a hundredth the film is no longer thin against the capillary length, and the measured thickness leaves this line.

What a plate takes with it

Pull a plate out of a bath and it comes out wet. How wet is not set by the plate, the bath or how much liquid there is, but by a competition in a region a fraction of a millimetre long that nobody looking at the plate can see — and the film goes as the two-thirds power of the speed, never as the first.

viscous · Coating The wall the outer flow is really solving for. A flat plate, the edge of its boundary layer, and the line the outer flow behaves as though the plate were on. The displacement thickness is the mass deficit divided by ρU — checked here against the profile's own integral rather than quoted — and moving the wall out by that much reproduces exactly the flow rate the viscous layer lets past. It is a third of the visible thickness of the layer and it is the only part of the layer the outer problem knows about.

The body the outer flow actually sees

A boundary layer lets less fluid past than an inviscid one would. The outer flow can be given exactly the same reduced flow rate by leaving the fluid inviscid and moving the wall out — so the potential flow that matters is not the flow past the body, but the flow past the body plus a thickness the boundary layer computes.

inviscid · Interaction The only candidate the far field allows, and the wall it slips past. The general Stokes solution has four constants; the condition at infinity kills two of them and fixes a third, leaving one to satisfy two conditions at the wall. Setting the stream function to zero there uses it up, and the tangential velocity that remains is exactly twice the free stream — for every radius, every speed, and every fluid.

The flow with no solution

Creeping flow past a sphere has a solution and everybody knows it. Creeping flow past a cylinder has none — not a difficult one, not one needing a clever method. The equations, the no-slip condition and the uniform stream at infinity are inconsistent, and the residual is exactly twice the free stream.

viscous · Stokes' paradox The exact solution and its three approximations, at ε = 0.02. The outer solution is excellent everywhere except in a layer of width ε at the left, where it is wrong by a whole unit. The inner solution is excellent inside that layer and wrong everywhere else. The composite is their sum less the part they agree about, and it is within order ε of the exact solution across the whole interval — which is the entire content of matched asymptotics, drawn.

One formula for both ends

Two limits, each with its own description, neither valid everywhere. The composite is the sum less the part they agree about, and it is uniformly good — but the overlap region that justifies the construction does not exist at ε = 0.01, and the composite is still accurate to two per cent there.

regimes · Crossover Two theories, one composite, and the aspect ratio between them. The lift-curve slope against aspect ratio. Prandtl's lifting line is exact as the aspect ratio goes to infinity and Jones's slender-wing theory is exact as it goes to zero, and each is generous outside its own limit. Helmbold's formula reduces to both with no free constant, which is what a composite expansion is, and runs under them where they disagree.

Where the line stops being a line

Prandtl's lifting line replaces a wing with a single bound vortex and its trailing sheet, and the formula that comes out is the most quoted in low-speed aerodynamics. Solved numerically at aspect ratio one it returns its own closed form to sixteen decimals — and the answer is forty-one per cent too high.

circulation · Finite wing And they are one piece of arithmetic. All three corrections against one over the logarithm of their own large parameter. Each is a straight line through the origin, with its own slope: one third exactly for the enstrophy range, near one for the wall layer, and near ln 10 for Oseen's per-decade measure. Three disappointments in three different fields, written up separately, are the same function.

The three that never converge

Oseen's drag coefficient, the overlap layer's power-law exponent and the enstrophy range's slope are three separate disappointments in three different fields. They are one piece of arithmetic, and the arithmetic says why none of them will ever be reached.

regimes · Crossover

Named alongside it

The objects these essays reach for when they reach for this one.

Model limitAsymptoticsBoundary layerConvergenceCreeping flowDimensionlessLogarithmOseenOverlap layerReynolds numberScalingStokes' drag

All concepts