ME 563 - Intermediate Fluid Dynamics - Su

Lecture 5 - Limitations of ideal fluid theory / role of viscosity

Reading: Acheson, chapter 1, chapter 2 (through §2.3).

In the last lecture we introduced the concept of circulation, which we defined as –

Z
Γ= u · dx
C

where C is a closed curve. The circulation around an airfoil explains the lift generated. Consider
the airfoil in Fig. 1, surrounded by a curve C, along which we will compute the circulation in the
direction indicated. Assume that the mean airflow is horizontal, from left to right, in the reference

Figure 1: Computation of the circulation around a wing.

frame where the wing is stationary.

To compute the circulation, first assume that the sides labeled 2 and 4 are far enough away
from the wing that the flow has no vertical component there, so u · dx = 0 on those sides. Also,
because C is a rectangle, sides 1 and 3 have the same length, but on side 1 we integrate in the
positive x-direction and on side 3 we integrate in the negative x-direction. The circulation around
C then becomes
side 1 side 3
zZ }| { zZ }| {
Γ = u dx + −u dx
Z side 1 side 3
z}|{ z}|{
= ( u − u ) dx. (1)

What do we know about the values of u above and below the wing? We can assume that the
flow is steady and irrotational, and that gravity is negligible. By the (second) Bernoulli theorem,
p + 12 ρ|u|2 is constant everywhere. For the wing to have lift, the pressure on the lower surface has
to be greater than that on the upper surface, which then means that the air speed below the wing
(along side 3 of C) has to be less than the air speed above the wing (side 1 of C). From (1), this
means that the circulation, Γ, is negative (for the direction of integration defined in Fig. 1).
Bernoulli’s theorems are formulated for ideal fluids, and while real fluids aren’t ideal, ideal fluid
theory does a good job of predicting lift for airfoils at small angles of attack. (At high angles of
attack, ideal fluid theory fails rapidly, as in Fig. 1.11 in the text.) We have shown that the lift of
an airfoil depends on the circulation around it. Let’s think a little bit more about the circulation
being nonzero.
Specifically:
• We have assumed that the mean flow in which we’ve immersed our wing is irrotational (has
zero vorticity), that the flow around the wing can be treated as two-dimensional. These are
perfectly valid assumptions.

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 • By Stokes’s theorem, we showed that the circulation around a curve C is zero if the vorticity
is zero over the entire surface S bounded by C.

• By considering the vorticity equation in the last lecture, we showed that for two-dimensional
flows of ideal fluid subject to conservative body forces, the vorticity of each individual fluid
element is conserved.

Given all this, we might reasonably think:

• It appears that vorticity correlates with circulation, and the vorticity in the flow surrounding
the wing is zero.

• So how does the circulation around the wing arise?

1 Viscosity
To explain this properly, we have to consider what happens when a wing, initially at rest, is set
into motion suddenly. (Described in §1.1 in the text.) It turns out that as the wing is set into
motion, a vortex (with, of course, nonzero vorticity) forms at the trailing edge of the wing. As
we will (hopefully) cover later, the circulation contained in the vortex is equal and opposite to the
circulation around the wing. The vortex trails further and further behind the wing as time evolves.
When we look at a wing in steady flow, we can assume that the vortex is, effectively, infinitely far
behind the wing, so the wing can be considered to be surrounded by irrotational flow. However,
the circulation around the wing, which balances the circulation in the vortex, remains.
Here is a subtle point: while the existence of circulation around an airfoil is permissible by
ideal fluid theory, we can’t explain the origin of the circulation unless the viscosity of the fluid is
considered.
Viscosity can be a tricky concept because there are major qualitative differences in fluid flows
with very small viscosity and those with no viscosity. That is, the behavior of a fluid with very
small viscosity can be vastly different from the behavior of a fluid with zero viscosity.

1.1 Viscous forces

One of the properties that define an ideal fluid is that the only force acting across any surface
element in the fluid is the pressure, which acts in a direction normal to the plane. The simplest
explanation of viscous fluids is that they have an additional force that acts tangential to a given
surface element. This force depends on the velocity gradient across the surface element. A fast
layer of fluid wants to drag a slow layer along with it, and the slow layer wants to slow down the
fast layer. (Fig. 2.) As shown in the figure, while pressure is a normal force (meaning its direction),

Figure 2: Pressure forces and viscous shear forces across a surface in a fluid.

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viscosity imposes shear forces1 . Specifically, viscous fluids resist shear, i.e. they oppose velocity
gradients.
Many of the qualitative differences between viscous and inviscid fluids arise because viscous
fluid flows have boundary layers near solid surfaces. Boundary layers arise because of the no-slip
condition for viscous fluids, which holds that a fluid element in contact with a solid boundary must
have the same velocity as the boundary. (Essentially, this is because momentum is transferred across
a fluid-solid interface similarly to the way momentum is transferred across a fluid-fluid interface.)
The result of the no-slip condition is that while a flow can appear to be happily streaming past a
body, say a wing or a car or something, at the actual solid surface the fluid and the body have the
same velocity. One clear manifestation of this is the way you can’t clean off a dusty car just by
driving fast.
In this class we will only be concerned with Newtonian fluids, where the viscous shear stress,
τ , is proportional to the velocity gradient. In Fig. 1, this means that –
du
τ =µ
dy
where µ is called the coefficient of dynamic viscosity.

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There are also normal viscous forces, which we’ll describe later, but the shear force is the one that’s more intuitive.