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

Source — where it appears

A point from which fluid appears at a stated volume rate, whose velocity field falls off inversely with distance. It has no physical counterpart on its own and is indispensable as a building block, since bodies are assembled from sources and sinks.

Named by 8 essays across 4 fields — each of them below, with the objects they name alongside it.

Ideal flow past a cylinder. A uniform stream past a circular cylinder in a fluid with no viscosity. The solution is exact and closed-form: streamlines part at a stagnation point, run round the surface and close up perfectly behind, and the pressure recovers to exactly what it was in front.

Flows add up

The equations of ideal flow are linear, so solutions can be laid on top of one another. A uniform stream plus a doublet produces a cylinder that nobody put there, and almost every classical result is built this way.

inviscid · Superposition Flow net — a stream past a cylinder. Two families of curves drawn over the same flow: the streamlines, along which the streamfunction is constant, and the equipotentials, along which the velocity potential is constant. They cross at right angles at every point, because they are the two parts of a single analytic function of position.

Bodies made out of nothing

Put a source in a stream and a solid nose appears in front of it. Put a sink downstream of the source and the nose closes into a finite body. Nothing was placed in the fluid — the surface is a level set of a function, and it behaves like a wall because nothing crosses it.

inviscid · Superposition Every one of these is a solution, and they lift different amounts. Lift coefficient against the circulation the aerofoil was told to carry, with the Kutta condition's own answer marked. Each point is a complete solve: the sources were found for that circulation and the surface is a wall to within 1.3e-4 at every collocation point. Every member satisfies the equations of motion and the boundary condition, and the lift runs through them at exactly 2Γ/Uc — Kutta–Joukowski appearing as a property of the family rather than as a result about any member of it. Ideal flow round a closed body does not have a unique answer, and the Kutta condition is the extra sentence that picks one.

Nothing but the edge

Cut an aerofoil into panels, put a singularity on each, and require the surface to be a wall. The system that comes out has one more unknown than it has equations, and the row that is missing is not a bookkeeping slip — it is the fact that ideal flow round a closed body has no unique answer at all.

circulation · Panel Three contours, one force, three different accounts of it. The same vortex, and the same total force on it, computed by a momentum balance over three contours of the same area. All three give ρUΓ to eight figures. What differs is the bookkeeping: the tall box gets 16 per cent of it from pressure and the rest from momentum flux, the wide box gets 84 per cent from pressure, and the circle gets exactly half. Neither part converges on its own as the contour is enlarged — each falls off like 1/r while the contour grows like r — so the split is a property of the shape of the limit rather than of the flow.

Where the reaction to a wing's lift is

The force on a body can be computed on any contour drawn round it, and the answer is the same every time. How much of that answer is pressure and how much is momentum flux is not — it runs from three per cent to ninety-seven, and the difference is the shape of the contour.

inviscid · Far field The two bodies the far field cannot tell apart. A circular cylinder and the Rankine oval that has the same doublet strength: 1.17 radii long against the circle's one, and 0.94 tall against its one, with a source and a sink 1.2 apart inside it. On the pale ring, one and a half radii out, the two flows differ by 19 per cent of the disturbance; at six radii by one per cent; at infinity not at all. What a far field records of a body is three numbers — its circulation, its net outflow and its doublet — and nothing else survives the journey.

What the far field remembers

Three numbers survive the journey to infinity — a circulation, a net outflow and a dipole — and nothing else about a body does. Two shapes with nothing in common can therefore make the same flow a few radii away, and the difference between them dies two orders faster than the disturbance either one makes.

inviscid · Far field Ideal flow past a sphere, drawn in a meridional plane. The Stokes stream function of ideal flow past a sphere, contoured at equal intervals. Its relations to the velocity carry factors of r sin θ that the plane stream function does not have, and differencing it reproduces the closed-form velocity to 10⁻¹¹. The surface speed at the equator is exactly one and a half times the free stream, against twice for a circular cylinder: a three-dimensional body lets the flow past in two directions rather than one.

The one number that runs out at three dimensions

A stream function is one function where the velocity is two, and four essays here are built on it. It exists because the divergence vanishes, it is single-valued only if nothing inside is making fluid, and in three dimensions it is not one function at all.

kinematics · Stream function A cone sends 1.7 per cent of its jet's momentum sideways at 15°. A conical divergent section of 15° half-angle and exit area ratio 25, drawn to scale from its throat to its lip, with its virtual apex to the left. The gas leaves as a source flow: straight streamlines from the apex, each at its own angle, and a Mach number uniform on spheres centred there. On the spherical cap through the lip the flow is normal to the surface and uniform, at Mach 3.925 for a gas with γ = 1.2; its axial momentum is ρV² times the cap's projection onto the exit disc, while the mass crossing it is ρV times the cap itself. The ratio of the two areas is (1 + cos α)/2 = 0.9830, and it is the only thing the cone's shape does to the momentum. On the flat exit plane the flow is not uniform: its edge is further from the apex than its centre, and the Mach number there is higher.

The jet a cone sprays sideways

The one-dimensional nozzle sends all its gas straight out along the axis. A real divergent section is a cone, and the gas leaves it as a spray of straight lines from the cone's apex. Only the axial part of that momentum pushes, and the share that does is (1 + cos α)/2 — 98.3 per cent at fifteen degrees, 93.3 at thirty — whatever the gas, the Mach number or the area ratio, and it touches the momentum and never the pressure.

compressible · Area mach One body, three interior representations. An ellipse four fifths as tall as it is long, in a uniform stream, with three sets of singularities inside it: a point doublet at the centre, a ring of them at four tenths of the semi-major axis, and a uniform disc of them. Outside the ring the three produce the identical flow to fifteen figures. Inside, they are not remotely the same field.

The inside a flow does not decide

Every body on this site is built out of singularities that are not there. The exterior flow does not merely fail to determine them — it leaves an infinite family, whose members produce the identical field to the last bit outside and are nothing alike inside, and whose coefficients span five orders of magnitude for one unit free stream.

inviscid · Singularities

Named alongside it

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

DoubletBoundary conditionPotential flowSuperpositionCirculationModel limitConformal mapControl volumeFar fieldMomentum fluxMomentum theoremMultipole

All concepts