Classical Fluid Dynamics

The content of this book is based, largely, on the core curriculum in geophys­ ical fluid dynamics which I and my colleagues in the Department of Geophysical Sciences at The University of Chicago have taught for the past decade. Our purpose in developing a core curriculum was to provide to advanced undergraduates and entering graduate students a coherent and systematic introduction to the theory of geophysical fluid dynamics. The curriculum and the outline of this book were devised to form a sequence of courses of roughly one and a half academic years (five academic quarters) in length. The goal of the sequence is to help the student rapidly advance to the point where independent study and research are practical expectations. It quickly became apparent that several topics (e. g. , some aspects of potential theory) usually thought of as forming the foundations of a fluid-dynamics curriculum were merely classical rather than essential and could be, however sadly, dispensed with for our purposes. At the same time, the diversity of interests of our students is so great that no curriculum can truly be exhaust­ ive in such a curriculum period. It seems to me that the best that can be achieved as a compromise is a systematic introduction to some important segment of the total scope of geophysical fluid dynamics which is illustrative of its most fruitful methods.

This volume brings together four contributions to mathematical fluid mechanics, a classical but still highly active research field. The contributions cover not only the classical Navier-Stokes equations and Euler equations, but also some simplified models, and fluids interacting with elastic walls. The questions addressed in the lectures range from the basic problems of existence/blow-up of weak and more regular solutions, to modeling and aspects related to numerical methods.

Exploring new variations of classical methods as well as recent approaches appearing in the field, Computational Fluid Dynamics demonstrates the extensive use of numerical techniques and mathematical models in fluid mechanics.

This book details a systematic characteristics-based finite element procedure to investigate incompressible, free-surface and compressible flows. The fluid dynamics equations are derived from basic thermo-mechanical principles and the multi-dimensional and infinite-directional upstream procedure is developed by combining a finite element discretization of a characteristics-bias system with an implicit Runge-Kutta time integration. For the computational solution of the Euler and Navier Stokes equations, the procedure relies on the mathematics and physics of multi-dimensional characteristics. As a result, the procedure crisply captures contact discontinuities, normal as well as oblique shocks, and generates essentially non-oscillatory solutions for incompressible, subsonic, transonic, supersonic, and hypersonic inviscid and viscous flows.