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Vortex_Sheet_Evolution
The complex potential at a point
If there are
Since the second term in the last equation is a constant, it can be neglected considering
Now letting
Using the infinite product expression for the sine function,
We have,
Or,
where
The velocity induced at the point
We need to seperate the real and imaginary parts to obtain the velocity components explicitly.
Multiplying and dividing by the complex conjugate of the denominator, we get,
Using the shorthand notation
Using the identities
we have,
With the help of the identities
and
this simplifies to,
Or,
where
Consider an infinite vortex sheet along the x-axis. If we imagine this sheet to be made up of segments of length
Now we consider one of the vortex sheet segments. In the above formulation, this was represented as a single point vortex of strength
where the integrals are line integrals along the vortex sheet between any two limits of x differing by the period
When the point
The general analytical solution of these equations \eqref{eq:vel_2} is not available. So we proceed towards an approximate numerical solution by discretizing the vortex sheet segment into a number of point vortices. Consider the vortex sheet system shown in Figure \ref{fig:sheet} below.
Let
In view of this, the B-R equations become,
This is the form we shall use for our numerical discretization. If we assume the sheet to be made up of N panels of equal length
If the point of interest
It is customary to use the complex notation with
where
There are two primary issues associated with the vortex sheet problem.
- The short wavelength spurious growth associated with Kelvin - Helmholtz (K-H) instability
- The failure of rectangle rule approximation when the curvature becomes comparable with vortex spacing
The more the number of vortices, the better approximation we get for the shape of the vortex sheet. But it is well known that the shorter wavelengths grow faster with time in K-H instability of the vortex sheet. So the errors introduced at the position of vortices during numerical calculation perturb the sheet with a wavelength equal to the spacing between vortices. Thus using more number of vortices will lead to waves growing even faster. Hence the need for using high precision arithmetic for calculations with large number of vortices.
Note that the summation in Equation \eqref{eq:vel_num_complex} is resulting from the use of rectangle rule for the integration in Equation \eqref{eq:vel_2}. The approximation will work well as long as the derivatives of the integrands are not too large, i.e., as long as
Though reducing
where
Another implication of the usage of rectangle rule is that we need not use higher order methods for solving the ODE \eqref{eq:vel_num_complex_1} since we have already committed an error of order
The desigularized Birkhoff-Rott equations as given in Equation \eqref{eq:vel_num_complex_1} are,
Non-dimensionalizing the variables with the length scale
This leads to,
In what follows, we will leave out the overbar on the non-dimensional quantities for simplicity. The above equations \eqref{eq:vel_num_non_dim} can be written in Hamiltonian form in the following way. Let us define,
It is easy to check then that Equations \eqref{eq:vel_num_complex_1} can be rewritten as,
For example,
Since Equation \eqref{eq:Hamilitonian_system} form a Hamiltonian system, the Hamiltonian given by Equation \eqref{eq:Hamiltonian} is automatically conserved during the evolution of the vortex sheet. For numerical simulation purpose, a check on the following function will suffice for the conservation of Hamiltonian.
The Birkhoff-Rott equations are,
where
These are N ordinary differential equations for the complex variables
Let us rewrite the B-R equations as an equation governing the vector
Note that time does not explicitly appear in the function
There are four function evaluations of
TODO:
- Rosenhead, L. (1931) The formation of vortices from a surface of discontinuity, \emph{Proc. R. Soc. London Ser. A}, {\bf 134}, 823.
- Abid, M., Verga ,A. (2011) Turbulence driven by singularities in vortex sheet dynamics, \emph{Phys. Rev. E}, {\bf 84}, 026318.
- Krasny, R. (1986) Desingularization of periodic vortex sheet roll-up, \emph{J. Comp. Phys.}, {\bf 65}, p.292-313.
- Chorin, A.J. and Bernard, P.S. (1973) Discretization of a vortex sheet, with an example of roll-up, \emph{J. Comp. Phys.}, {\bf 13}, 423.