Table of Contents
“When a flow is both frictionless and irrotational, pleasant things happen.†– F.M. White, Fluid Mechanics 4th ed.
- potential flow
- irrotational flow, a potential flow is characterized by an irrotational velocity field
in potential flow, velocity is described as gradient of velocity potential (P182 fundametal of aerodynamics, Andersion)
The irrotationality of a potential flow is due to the curl of the gradient of a scalar always being equal to zero.
Features
- potential flow describes the velocity field as the gradient of a sclar function: the velocity potential.
- viscosity = 0
- frictionless, μ = 0
- potential flow could be incompressible or compressible
Assumptions
- irrotational flow
Why is irrotational flow called potential flow? because irrotational flows can be described by the velocity potential, φ
1 potential flow vs inviscid flow
(The terms potential flow and inviscid flow are almost synonymous and are frequently used interchangeably( panton, incompressible flow)
2 Applications
- potential flow is a valid approximation for several applications,
- flow around aircraft
- For instance, in computational fluid dynamics, one technique is to couple a potential flow solution outside the boundary layer to a solution of the boundary layer equations inside the boundary layer.
- groundwater flow
- acoustics
- water waves
- electroosmotic flow
- flow around aircraft
3 Limits
- In flow regions where vorticity is known to be important,
such as wakes and boundary layers, potential flow theory is not able to provide reasonable predictions of the flow
4 References
Chapter 6: Ideal Flow. Kundu, fluid mechanics Chapter 18: Ideal Flows in a Plane Panton, Ronald L. Incompressible Flow. 4th ed. Wiley, 2013. ISBN: 9781118013434. file:///c:/akmkemin/Backup/academic_theory_books/potential-flow file:///c:/akmkemin/Backup/academic_theory_books/potential-flow/Potential-Flow-Theory-mit.pdf
Created: 2018-08-19 Sun 18:42
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