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Hydrodynamics
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Hydrodynamics is a branch of theoretical fluid dynamics which deals with flow of an ideal fluid. An ideal fluid is both incompressible and inviscid.
Blaise Pascal in the 1600s contributed some of the initial theory to this field. The term originates from the work of Daniel Bernoulli, based on the title of his work called Hydrodynamica (1738). He and Leonhard Euler established the general equations of hydrodynamics.
The practice was continued by Joseph Louis Lagrange (1736-1813) with the Euler-Lagrange system, Jean le Rond d'Alembert (1717-1783) discovered the Cauchy-Riemann equations, Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749-1827) with the governing equation in the potential flow named after him, Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz (1821-1894) and William Thomson, Lord Kelvin (1824-1907) with Kelvin-Helmholtz instability (see also the Rayleigh-Taylor, Plateau-Rayleigh and Richtmyer-Meshkov instabilities) and Helmholtz's work on vortices.
In 1879, Horace Lamb's book, Hydrodynamics, was published, a classic and influential text in the field.
An analogous field of study, the dynamics of electrically conducting fluids in magnetic fields is called magnetohydrodynamics.
- Lamb, H., "Hydrodynamics", 6th ed., Dover Publications, New York (1945).
- Milne-Thompson, L. M., "Theoretical Hydrodynamics", 5th ed., Macmillan, New York (1968).
- O'Neill, M. E. and F. Chorlton, "Ideal and Incompressible Fluid Dynamics", Ellis Horwood, Chichester (1986).
- Robertson, J. M., "Hydrodynamics in Theory and Application", Prentice-Hall, NJ (1965).
- Vallentine, H. R., "Applied Hydrodynamics", 5th ed., Dover Publications (1996).