Potential flow

August 11, 2014

The classic closed form solution for incompressible flow past a two-dimensional cylinder.

The image represents the stream function of an incompressible inviscid flow past a cylinder. The stream function has a closed form solution in polar coordinates:

where a is the cylinder radius.

The pressure field is obtained from Bernoulli's equation. The velocity components in polar coordinates are:

giving the pressure coefficient:

On the cylinder surface (r = a) this reduces to: