Fluid mechanics

Fluid mechanics is a branch of physics concerned with George Gabriel Stokes in the NavierStokes equations,
the mechanics of uids (liquids, gases, and plasmas) and boundary layers were investigated (Ludwig Prandtl,
and the forces on them. Fluid mechanics has a wide Theodore von Krmn), while various scientists such as
range of applications, including mechanical engineer- Osborne Reynolds, Andrey Kolmogorov, and Georey
ing, civil engineering, chemical engineering, geophysics, Ingram Taylor advanced the understanding of uid vis-
astrophysics, and biology. Fluid mechanics can be di- cosity and turbulence.
vided into uid statics, the study of uids at rest; and uid
dynamics, the study of the eect of forces on uid mo-
tion. It is a branch of continuum mechanics, a subject 2 Main branches
which models matter without using the information that
it is made out of atoms; that is, it models matter from
a macroscopic viewpoint rather than from microscopic. 2.1 Fluid statics
Fluid mechanics, especially uid dynamics, is an active
eld of research with many problems that are partly or Main article: Fluid statics
wholly unsolved. Fluid mechanics can be mathematically
complex, and can best be solved by numerical methods, Fluid statics or hydrostatics is the branch of uid me-
typically using computers. A modern discipline, called chanics that studies uids at rest. It embraces the study
computational uid dynamics (CFD), is devoted to this of the conditions under which uids are at rest in stable
approach to solving uid mechanics problems. Particle equilibrium; and is contrasted with uid dynamics, the
image velocimetry, an experimental method for visualiz- study of uids in motion. Hydrostatics oers physical
ing and analyzing uid ow, also takes advantage of the explanations for many phenomena of everyday life, such
highly visual nature of uid ow. as why atmospheric pressure changes with altitude, why
wood and oil oat on water, and why the surface of wa-
ter is always at and horizontal whatever the shape of
1 Brief history its container. Hydrostatics is fundamental to hydraulics,
the engineering of equipment for storing, transporting
and using uids. It is also relevant to some aspect of
Main article: History of uid mechanics
geophysics and astrophysics (for example, in understand-
ing plate tectonics and anomalies in the Earths gravita-
The study of uid mechanics goes back at least to the tional eld), to meteorology, to medicine (in the context
days of ancient Greece, when Archimedes investigated of blood pressure), and many other elds.
uid statics and buoyancy and formulated his famous
law known now as the Archimedes principle, which
was published in his work On Floating Bodies gen- 2.2 Fluid dynamics
erally considered to be the rst major work on uid
mechanics. Rapid advancement in uid mechanics be- Main article: Fluid dynamics
gan with Leonardo da Vinci (observations and experi-
ments), Evangelista Torricelli (invented the barometer), Fluid dynamics is a subdiscipline of uid mechanics
Isaac Newton (investigated viscosity) and Blaise Pascal that deals with uid owthe science of liquids and
(researched hydrostatics, formulated Pascals law), and gases in motion. Fluid dynamics oers a systematic
was continued by Daniel Bernoulli with the introduc- structurewhich underlies these practical disciplines
tion of mathematical uid dynamics in Hydrodynamica that embraces empirical and semi-empirical laws derived
(1738). from ow measurement and used to solve practical prob-
Inviscid ow was further analyzed by various mathe- lems. The solution to a uid dynamics problem typically
maticians (Leonhard Euler, Jean le Rond d'Alembert, involves calculating various properties of the uid, such
Joseph Louis Lagrange, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Simon as velocity, pressure, density, and temperature, as func-
Denis Poisson) and viscous ow was explored by a tions of space and time. It has several subdisciplines it-
multitude of engineers including Jean Lonard Marie self, including aerodynamics (the study of air and other
Poiseuille and Gotthilf Hagen. Further mathematical gases in motion) and hydrodynamics (the study of liq-
justication was provided by Claude-Louis Navier and uids in motion). Fluid dynamics has a wide range of

1
2 5 NAVIERSTOKES EQUATIONS

applications, including calculating forces and moments
on aircraft, determining the mass ow rate of petroleum
through pipelines, predicting evolving weather patterns,
understanding nebulae in interstellar space and modeling
explosions. Some uid-dynamical principles are used in
trac engineering and crowd dynamics.
3 Relationship to continuum me-
chanics
Fluid mechanics is a subdiscipline of continuum mechan-
ics, as illustrated in the following table.
In a mechanical view, a uid is a substance that does not
support shear stress; that is why a uid at rest has the shape
of its containing vessel. A uid at rest has no shear stress.
4 Assumptions
Rate of Change of Property, N for a System
Control Surface
Control Volume
is passing from inside to outside. This can be expressed as
an equation in integral form over the control volume.[1]
The continuum assumption is an idealization of
continuum mechanics under which uids can be treated as
continuous, even though, on a microscopic scale, they are
composed of molecules. Under the continuum assump-
tion, macroscopic (observed/measurable) properties such
as density, pressure, temperature, and bulk velocity are
taken to be well-dened at innitesimal volume ele-
ments -- small in comparison to the characteristic length
scale of the system, but large in comparison to molecu-
lar length scale. Fluid properties can vary continuously
from one volume element to another and are average val-
ues of the molecular properties. The continuum hypoth-
esis can lead to inaccurate results in applications like su-
personic speed ows, or molecular ows on nano scale.
Those problems for which the continuum hypothesis fails,
can be solved using statistical mechanics. To determine
whether or not the continuum hypothesis applies, the
Knudsen number, dened as the ratio of the molecular
mean free path to the characteristic length scale, is eval-
uated. Problems with Knudsen numbers below 0.1 can
be evaluated using the continuum hypothesis, but molec-
ular approach (statistical mechanics) can be applied for
all ranges of Knudsen numbers.

+ Input Rate

+ Production Rate
5 NavierStokes equations
- Consumption Rate

Main article: NavierStokes equations

- Output Rate

The NavierStokes equations (named after Claude-

Louis Navier and George Gabriel Stokes) are dierential
equations that describe the force balance at a given point
Balance for some integrated uid quantity in a control volume within a uid. For an incompressible uid with vector
enclosed by a control surface. velocity eld u , the NavierStokes equations are

The assumptions inherent to a uid mechanical treatment t + (u )u = P + u .

u 1 2

of a physical system can be expressed in terms of math- Analogous to Newtons equations of motion, the Navier
ematical equations. Fundamentally, every uid mechan- Stokes equations describe changes in momentum (force)
ical system is assumed to obey: in response to pressure P and viscosity, parameterized,
here, by the kinematic viscosity . Occasionally, body
Conservation of mass forces, such as the gravitational force or Lorentz force
are added to the equations. Solutions of the Navier
Conservation of energy Stokes equations for a given physical problem must be
Conservation of momentum sought with the help of calculus. In practical terms
only the simplest case can be solved exactly in this way.
The continuum assumption These cases generally involve non-turbulent, steady ow
in which the Reynolds number is small. For more com-
For example, the assumption that mass is conserved plex cases, especially those involving turbulence, such
means that for any xed control volume (for example, a as global weather systems, aerodynamics, hydrodynamics
spherical volume) enclosed by a control surface the and many more, solutions of the NavierStokes equations
rate of change of the mass contained in that volume is can currently only be found with the help of computers.
equal to the rate at which mass is passing through the sur- This branch of science is called computational uid dy-
face from outside to inside, minus the rate at which mass namics.
7.1 Equations for a Newtonian uid 3

6 Inviscid and Viscous Fluids 7.1 Equations for a Newtonian uid

An inviscid uid has no viscosity, = 0 . In practice, an
inviscid ow is an idealization, one that facilitates math-
ematical treatment. In fact, purely inviscid ows are only
known to be realized in the case of superuidity. Other-
wise, uids are generally viscous, a property that is of-
ten most important within a boundary layer near a solid
surface,[2] where the ow must match onto the no-slip
condition at the solid. In some cases, the mathematics of
a uid mechanical system can be treated by assuming that
the uid outside of boundary layers is inviscid, and then
matching its solution onto that for a thin laminar bound-
ary layer.
For uid ow over a porous boundary, the uid velocity
can be discontinuous between the free uid and the uid
in the porous media (this is related to the Beavers and
Joseph condition). Further, it is useful at low subsonic
speeds to assume that a gas is incompressible that is,
the density of the gas does not change even though the
speed and static pressure change.
Main article: Newtonian uid
The constant of proportionality between the viscous stress
tensor and the velocity gradient is known as the viscosity.
A simple equation to describe incompressible Newtonian
uid behaviour is
dv
=
dy
where
is the shear stress exerted by the uid ("drag")
is the uid viscosity a constant of propor-
tionality
dv
is the velocity gradient perpendicular to the
dy
direction of shear.
For a Newtonian uid, the viscosity, by denition, de-
pends only on temperature and pressure, not on the forces
acting upon it. If the uid is incompressible the equation
governing the viscous stress (in Cartesian coordinates) is

( )
7 Newtonian versus non- ij =
vi
+
vj
xj xi
Newtonian uids
where

A Newtonian uid (named after Isaac Newton) is
dened to be a uid whose shear stress is linearly
proportional to the velocity gradient in the direction
perpendicular to the plane of shear. This denition
means regardless of the forces acting on a uid, it con-
tinues to ow. For example, water is a Newtonian uid,
because it continues to display uid properties no matter
how much it is stirred or mixed. A slightly less rigorous
denition is that the drag of a small object being moved
slowly through the uid is proportional to the force ap-
plied to the object. (Compare friction). Important uids,
like water as well as most gases, behave to good approx-
imation as a Newtonian uid under normal conditions
on Earth.[3]
By contrast, stirring a non-Newtonian uid can leave a
hole behind. This will gradually ll up over time this
behaviour is seen in materials such as pudding, oobleck,
or sand (although sand isn't strictly a uid). Alterna-
tively, stirring a non-Newtonian uid can cause the vis-
cosity to decrease, so the uid appears thinner (this is
seen in non-drip paints). There are many types of non-
Newtonian uids, as they are dened to be something
that fails to obey a particular property for example,
most uids with long molecular chains can react in a non-
Newtonian manner.[3]
ij is the shear stress on the ith face of a uid
element in the j th direction
vi is the velocity in the ith direction
xj is the j th direction coordinate.
If the uid is not incompressible the general form for the
viscous stress in a Newtonian uid is
( )
vi vj 2
ij = + ij v + ij v
xj xi 3
where is the second viscosity coecient (or bulk vis-
cosity). If a uid does not obey this relation, it is termed
a non-Newtonian uid, of which there are several types.
Non-Newtonian uids can be either plastic, Bingham
plastic, pseudoplastic, dilatant, thixotropic, rheopectic,
viscoelastic.
In some applications another rough broad division among
uids is made: ideal and non-ideal uids. An Ideal uid
is non-viscous and oers no resistance whatsoever to a
shearing force. An ideal uid really does not exist, but in
some calculations, the assumption is justiable. One ex-
ample of this is the ow far from solid surfaces. In many
4 12 EXTERNAL LINKS

cases the viscous eects are concentrated near the solid White, Frank M. (2003), Fluid Mechanics,
boundaries (such as in boundary layers) while in regions McGrawHill, ISBN 0-07-240217-2
of the ow eld far away from the boundaries the viscous
eects can be neglected and the uid there is treated as Nazarenko, Sergey (2014), Fluid Dynamics via Ex-
it were inviscid (ideal ow). When the viscosity is ne- amples and Solutions, CRC Press (Taylor & Francis
gleted, the term containing the viscous stress tensor in group), ISBN 978-1-43-988882-7
the NavierStokes equation vanishes. The equation re-
duced in this form is called the Euler equation.
12 External links
8 See also Free Fluid Mechanics books

Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics

Aerodynamics
CFDWiki the Computational Fluid Dynamics ref-
Applied mechanics erence wiki.
Bernoullis principle Educational Particle Image Velocimetry resources
Communicating vessels and demonstrations

Computational uid dynamics

Secondary ow
Dierent types of boundary conditions in uid dy-
namics

9 Notes
[1] Batchelor (1967), p. 74.

[2] Kundu, P.K., Cohen, I.M., & Hu, H.H., Fluid Mechanics,
Chapter 10, sub-chapter 1

[3] Batchelor (1967), p. 145.

10 References
Batchelor, George K. (1967), An Introduction to
Fluid Dynamics, Cambridge University Press, ISBN
0-521-66396-2

11 Further reading
Falkovich, Gregory (2011), Fluid Mechanics (A
short course for physicists), Cambridge University
Press, ISBN 978-1-107-00575-4
Kundu, Pijush K.; Cohen, Ira M. (2008), Fluid Me-
chanics (4th revised ed.), Academic Press, ISBN
978-0-12-373735-9
Currie, I. G. (1974), Fundamental Mechanics of
Fluids, McGraw-Hill, Inc., ISBN 0-07-015000-1
Massey, B.; Ward-Smith, J. (2005), Mechanics of
Fluids (8th ed.), Taylor & Francis, ISBN 978-0-415-
36206-1
 5

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