Descriptif

The motion of fluids plays a critical role in many phenomena or processes that are the center of our daily life or engineering systems, ranging from the flight and/or propulsion of aircrafts and vessels, the generation of electricity from wind-turbines, the flow of blood in our arteries, the atmospheric and ocean circulations guiding our climate or microscopic flows in lab-on-a-chip systems.  This course will provide the students the fundamental tools to model, understand and analyze the motion of such fluid flows in three dimensions, and evaluate the resulting forces on the bounding surfaces. The material covered in this course will build upon several courses of the program including Mechanics and Heat (PHY 101), Mathematical Methods for Physicists I and II (PHY 102 and PHY 105), Classical Mechanics (PHY 201) and Waves and Heat Transfer in Geophysics (PHY 206).

The following subjects are expected to be treated:

• Eulerian description of motion of 3D flows
• Mass and momentum conservation
• Hydrostatic pressure
• Viscosity and viscous stresses
• Motion of a Newtonian fluid: Navier-Stokes equations
• Non-dimensional analysis and scalings
• Parallel and weakly-non parallel flows
• Inviscid flows and potential flow theory
• Vorticity
• Introduction to boundary layers.