Inviscid Flow and Potential Flow Method

This chapter introduces inviscid flow and potential flow method. Characteristics of inviscid flow is introduced and the rationality of neglecting viscosity in many actual flow cases is discussed. Then the characteristics of rotational flow for inviscid flow is discussed. The three factors that may cause a fluid to change from irrotational to rotational are enumerated and explained, namely the viscous force, baroclinic flow, and non-conservative body force. For irrotational flow, velocity potential is introduced and several elementary flows are taken as an example to illustrate the computational methods for planar potential flow theory. In the end, complex potential is briefly introduced.