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

Corner — the series

One essay so far on this idea, and more questions about it than one essay answers.
  1. 45° of corner, and an infinite number of eddies in it. The creeping flow in a corner of 45 degrees, drawn from Moffatt's similarity solution. Each eddy turns the opposite way to its neighbours and is 3.17 times smaller and 1.6e+3 times weaker than the one outside it. The contour levels are rescaled inside each eddy, because they differ in strength by three orders of magnitude per step and a single set of levels would show the first and nothing else — which is itself the reason nobody has seen the third. The dividing lines between eddies are drawn where the stream function changes sign, and the dots are the centres, both found from the solved field.

    The eddies nobody stirs

    A slow flow past the mouth of a sharp corner does not simply fail to get in. The corner fills with an infinite sequence of counter-rotating eddies, each about three times smaller and sixteen hundred times weaker than the last, and the whole structure is decided by one complex number.

    part 1 · viscous

All series