Incompressible irrotational flow Enrique Ortega
[email protected] Rotation of a fluid element As seen in M1_2, the arbitrary motion of a fluid element can be decomposed into • A translation or displacement due to the velocity. • A deformation (due to extensional and shear strains) mainly related to viscous and compressibility effects. • A rotation (of solid body type) measured through the midpoint of the diagonal of the fluid element. The rate of rotation is defined as the angular velocity. The latter is related to the vorticity of the flow through: d 2 V (1) dt Important: for an incompressible, inviscid flow, the momentum equations show that the vorticity for each fluid element remains constant (see pp. 17 of M1_3). Note that w is positive in the 2 – Irrotational flow counterclockwise sense Irrotational and rotational flow ij 0 According to the Prandtl’s boundary layer concept, thedomaininatypical(high-Re) aerodynamic problem at low can be divided into outer and inner flow regions under the following considerations: Extracted from [1]. • In the outer region (away from the body) the flow is considered inviscid and irrotational (viscous contributions vanish in the momentum equations and =0 due to farfield vorticity conservation). • In the inner region the viscous effects are confined to a very thin layer close to the body (vorticity is created at the boundary layer by viscous stresses) and a thin wake extending downstream (vorticity must be convected with the flow). Under these hypotheses, it is assumed that the disturbance of the outer flow, caused by the body and the thin boundary layer around it, is about the same caused by the body alone.