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

Pathline — where it appears

The trajectory a single fluid parcel follows over time, which is what a marked particle traces out. It coincides with a streamline only in steady flow, and every Lagrangian statement in this collection is about it rather than about the field.

Named by 8 essays across 2 fields — each of them below, with the objects they name alongside it.

Streamlines and pathlines are not the same curve. In an unsteady flow the line tangent to the velocity everywhere at one instant, and the track a single particle actually follows, are different curves. They coincide only when the flow is steady, which is the hypothesis most figures forget to state.

Streamlines are not the paths particles take

Three different curves get drawn through a flow and they are routinely treated as one. In steady flow they coincide, which is why the confusion survives; in unsteady flow they are as different as a photograph and a long exposure.

kinematics · Flow curves The same patch, 6 periods later, in two flows. A round patch of 848 marked particles, advanced 6 periods by the blinking flow and by a steady flow of the same strength. The steady flow has drawn the patch into a smooth ribbon along a streamline and every particle in it is still on the streamline it started on; the blinking flow has folded the patch through itself repeatedly and its particles are spread across the whole region. Neither flow has any diffusion in it and neither has lost a particle. The difference between them is that one depends on time.

No randomness, and it mixes anyway

A steady two-dimensional flow cannot mix, however fast it is stirred, because its trajectories are its streamlines. Switch two vortices on and off alternately and the same fluid, obeying an exact map with nothing random in it, folds a patch of dye through itself until neighbouring particles separate by a factor of a thousand in six periods.

kinematics · Advection One flow, two observers, two pictures. The same ideal flow past a circular cylinder, drawn in the frame of the tunnel and in the frame of the undisturbed air. The two are related by subtracting one constant velocity. On the left the flow arrives from infinity, divides at a stagnation point on the nose and closes at another on the tail. On the right the air is at rest far away, the body pushes through it, the streamlines are closed loops, and there is no stagnation point anywhere in the field. Every force, every pressure and every measurement either observer can make is identical.

The picture belongs to whoever is watching

Photograph the flow past a cylinder from the tunnel and it has two stagnation points. Photograph the same flow from a frame moving with the air and it has none at all, and its surface speed is exactly the free stream at every angle. Both pictures are correct and no measurement distinguishes them.

kinematics · Frames One streamline, sectioned, in two steady flows. Every time a single streamline crosses the plane z ≡ 0 going upwards, a point is plotted. On the left the flow is integrable and the points lie on a curve, however long the trajectory is run. On the right one coefficient of the same exact solution has been changed and the same single streamline scatters over a sixth of the plane. Both flows are steady, both are incompressible to machine precision, and both are exact solutions of the Euler equations.

Steady, three-dimensional, and mixing anyway

A steady flow that solves the Euler equations exactly, with its vorticity equal to its velocity to six parts in ten thousand million — and one of its streamlines wanders through a sixth of the box while another, started nearby, lies on a curve for ever.

kinematics · Advection The line the dye actually draws. A streakline in an oscillating uniform stream: everything released from the origin over the last 3.4 units of time, drawn where it has got to at one instant. The parameter along it is release time, not distance and not time of flight, which is why it is a record rather than a curve of the field. The mean speed of 1 exceeds the amplitude of 0.6, so the fluid never reverses and the filament is single-valued in x.

The line the dye actually draws

The streakline is the curve most photographs really show, and of the three curves it is the hardest to compute, because it needs the whole history of the flow. This draws it, in a flow where all four curves have closed forms, and the third curve turns out to be a different kind of object from the other two rather than a third example of the same one.

kinematics · Flow curves Every particle leaves a flow that is a vortex at every instant. Eight fluid particles starting on a small circle in Haller's rotating-saddle flow, followed for 2.4 time units. At every instant the velocity gradient has complex eigenvalues and a positive Q — the flow is a vortex by every criterion that reads a snapshot — and every particle spirals outward, its distance growing as e to the time. The fluid is not held; it is flung.

Every snapshot says vortex, and every particle leaves

There is a flow in which the velocity gradient has complex eigenvalues at every point and every instant — a vortex by every criterion that reads a snapshot, in the frame the flow is measured in — and in which every fluid particle is flung away exponentially. The snapshot is not wrong about the gradient. It is wrong about the fluid, and it is wrong exactly when the strain's axes turn.

kinematics · Frames Every parcel goes straight while the streamlines wave. A uniform stream across the page carrying a pattern of transverse velocity with it, v = 0.6 sin(x − t): the streamlines at one instant, which wave, and the paths of five parcels over the next six time units, which are straight lines. Each parcel keeps the transverse velocity it started with, because the pattern moves with it; the streamlines are a snapshot of a pattern that is sliding past, and no parcel ever follows one.

A parcel goes straight while the streamlines curve

In a steady flow every parcel accelerates while the picture never changes. The opposite also happens: a flow whose picture changes all the time while no parcel accelerates at all, because the local and convective halves of the acceleration cancel exactly. Such a flow has no pressure gradient anywhere, and that is a severe demand. An incompressible flow can meet it only as a pure shear at every point; a cloud that can compress meets it freely and pays later, when its straight paths cross in a caustic.

kinematics · Acceleration The parcel over the top arrives first, and never waits for the other. Two parcels released together far upstream, a whisker above and below the streamline that divides at the nose of a Joukowski section 11.8% thick at 4°. Both crawl past the nose; then the upper one is carried over the top faster and reaches the far line 1.13 time units ahead — 0.279 chord-transit times — against the 1.59 that the circulation divided by the speed squared predicts. Behind the section they travel on side by side at the stream's speed and the gap between them never closes.

The upper parcel leads by the circulation

Transit time looked like a quantity that could not be measured: a parcel released near the dividing streamline crawls past the nose for as long as one likes. The difference between two parcels' transit times, one either side of that streamline, does not crawl. It converges, and on a thin section it is the circulation divided by the square of the speed — the lift, measured in seconds. The upper parcel arrives first by that much, and behind the wing the two never close the gap.

misconceptions · Equal transit

Named alongside it

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

StreamlineModel limitVorticitySteady flowStrain rateEulerian and LagrangianFlow mapThe Lyapunov exponentMixingObjectivityQ-criterionRotating frame

All concepts