Basic Developments in Fluid Dynamics: Volume 2

Free streamline theory for jets, and for cavity and wake flows is an important and active part of hydrodynamics. Ever since the pioneering works of Helmholtz (1868) and Kirchhoff (1869), who provided an explanation of D'Alembert's paradox and laid the foundation of the free-streamline theory, numerous basic developments in this field have been made by hydrodynamicists seeking solutions to practical applications, and by mathematicians exploring the theory. While the steady-state problems in this branch of potential theory may be regarded as having achieved a relatively mature (but still growing) state, applications, particularly the numerical computations, of the theory for the general case of arbitrary curved obstacles (or containers) in plane and three-dimensional flows have been made practical only recently with the aid of high-speed computers