Wikipedia:WikiProject Fluid dynamics

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WikiProject Fluid Dynamics aims primarily to organize articles in fluid dynamics, to determine appropriate levels of duplication between fluid dynamics-related articles, and to decide what information belongs in what articles. Hopefully, this WikiProject will also expose the gaps in Wikipedia's coverage of the topic, and can devote some attention to filling in those gaps.

Note: A few Wikipedians have gotten together to make some suggestions about how we might organize data in articles about fluid dynamics. These are only suggestions, things to give you focus and to get you going, and you shouldn't feel obligated in the least to follow them. But if you don't know what to write or where to begin, following the below guidelines may be helpful. Mainly, we just want you to write articles!


Contents

[edit] Articles included in project

Articles that should be considered in this project: (please add more as they occur to you)

And we'll touch on:

[edit] Parentage

The parent of this WikiProject is the WikiProject Physics.

[edit] Participants

[edit] General Strategy and Discussion

I created this wikiproject because I think that we need to reorganize all the fluid dynamics topics, determine what goes where, determine what we're missing, and fill it in. In particular, I was writing aerodynamics and having a hard time with it. Much of what I wanted to put there was already (rightly) contained in fluid dynamics. I followed the outline that someone had left there, and wrote about subsonic, transonic, and supersonic aerodynamics only to later find that there are already transonic and supersonic articles. The article shock waves doesn't seem to understand that it's applicable outside of explosions. Anyway, I don't want to do it by myself both because it's too much work and because I'd like to build some kind of consensus first on what belongs where.

Suggested structure?

Fluid mechanics: Knudsen number Fluid statics:Pascal's law, hydrostatic pressure,Archimedes principle, surface tension effects, capillary action, hydrosatic stability ...
Fluid dynamics: redirect Hydrodynamics; Conservation laws, Fluid kinematics Langrangian and Eulerian pictures - link to differential geometry if you want. Laminar flow: Streamline, Stream function Newtonian fluids Ideal fluids: Euler equations Incompressible flow: Bernoulli's equation, Potential flow, D'Alembert's paradox
Compressible flow: Supersonic, Transonic, Shock wave, Mach number, Sound barrier
Viscous fluids: Navier-Stokes equations, Vorticity Exact solutions: Poiseuille's law, Couette flow
Computational fluid dynamics
Solutions for specific regimes
Non-Newtonian fluids Rheology
Turbulence


Solutions of the Navier-Stokes equations for specfic regimes Flow past solid bodies: Drag (force), Lift (force) Rigid bodies Steady flow: Reynolds number Low Reynolds number: Stokes flow
High Reynolds number: Boundary layer, Coanda effect, Blasius' solution - transition to Turbulence
Unsteady flow: Strouhal number
Elastic bodies: Aeroelasticity
Free-surface flows: surface waves etc solitons
Buoyancy effects: Convection cell, Convection, Richardson number, Boussinesq approximation, Froude number, gravity current
Rotating frames: Ekman number, Rossby number, Rossby wave

Some questions:

  • Does the history of aerodynamics etc. belong in aerodynamics or should we have separate articles: History of aerodynamics, History of hydrodynamics, History of fluid dynamics etc.
Wiki style seems to be for separate history as in England and History of EnglandCutler 11:19, 4 Mar 2004 (UTC)
  • Do we put equations in articles like aerodynamics? Repeated there and on their own pages?
Keep equations in detail articles, not in top viewCutler 11:19, 4 Mar 2004 (UTC)
  • Do specific concepts like Prandtl-lifting line theory, thin-airfoil theory, Harris wave-drag calculations get mentioned? In their own article or in the big articles?
I like lots of small articles to modularise material (then you don't have to edit 10 articles to make a change) with top level articles to guide readers through the materialCutler 11:19, 4 Mar 2004 (UTC)
  • What major concepts are we missing and where should they go?

moink 22:58, 27 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Moink (and others interested in fluid dynamics): There is discussion (in Talk:Continuum mechanics) on working on a even broader reorganization of all materials science/mechanical engineering topics. Please visit Talk:Continuum mechanics to participate! -- hike395 05:03, 9 Feb 2004 (UTC)

The division into 'Laminar Flow' and 'Turbulence' looks positively strange. I'd prefer 'Turbulent Flow' to have its own article, but anyway... Where laminar flows occur (rarely) velocities are in the order of mm/s or less, so concepts such as supersonics have nothing to do with laminar flow. Similarly Navier-Stokes equations, CFD, vorticity... are concepts applied to turbulent flows. Dougalc 22:27, 7 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Thanks, Moink. Good start. No offense, Dougalc, but your rule regarding speeds in laminar vs turbulent flows is only true in an extremely restricted set of circumstances. High Mach-number laminar or quasi-laminar flows most certainly exist. On a more productive note, though, my one significant quibble is that it doesn't make sense to put CFD under viscous laminar flows. CFD certainly applies to laminar flows, turbulent flows, incompressible and compressible flows, Newtonian and non-Newtonian flows, etc. Just depends what you wrote the code to do! This just goes to show that the idea of a hierarchy necessarily breaks down at some point. As for what's missing, where do we put magnetohydrodynamics, combustion hydro, or radiation hydrodynamics (hydro coupled with rad transport)? Take MHD, for example. Sometimes the inviscid approximation is useful; other times it it not. Sometimes MHD flows are laminar, sometimes they are turbulent. Sometimes plasmas are well-approximated as continua so MHD is applicable, other times one must use other approaches in plasma physics and/or kinetic theory. Some CFD codes are written with magnetic fields included, although most are not. As well, one could just as well regard MHD as a subcategory of E&M rather than a subcategory of FD. We need a structure different from a simple tree. Petwil 20:23, 10 January 2006 (UTC)


Would like to get involved here. I agree organisation is needed. As with hike395, I think that we should get some alignment on continuum mechanics to kick off. Then, I think that the first task is to reinstate Fluid mechanics as an article in its own right, perhaps this structure works:

Fluid mechanics Fluid statics Lots of good stuff including Pascal's law, Archimedes principle, capilliary effects, droplet formation ... that often get neglected in the rush to complexity.
Fluid dynamics Get some global treatment before breakdown into subtopics ...

I think that there are three strands in this project:

  1. The constitutive (for want of a better word) above which is really about solving equations
  2. The phenomena: Taylor columns, Ekman spiral, Capilliary waves
  3. The applications: oceanography, meteorology, aerodynamics ...

Comments?Cutler 00:53, 4 Mar 2004 (UTC)

I've always thought of fluid mechanics and fluid dynamics as being synonyms, but I guess you're right, there's statics in there somewhere. And I like your division... instead of constituitive how about "underlying theory" or something. This is a hard one to divide. moink 01:28, 4 Mar 2004 (UTC)

I absolutely agree that fluid mechanics is a set including dynamics & statics. Now about Pascal's law, what is it? As I understood it was 'exert a force on an enclosed fluid and pressure transmitted throughout the fluid' eg how my hydraulic brakes/clutch work. Someone's already written an article under Pascal's Law (with a big L) which basically just says something about hydrostatic pressure. Dougalc 02:50, 22 Oct 2004 (UTC)



I have posted a proposed article for Fluid mechanics at Wikipedia:WikiProject Fluid dynamics/Top_draft. Please contribute. I will try to work on Fluid statics in the coming week. Cutler 12:59, 7 Mar 2004 (UTC)

So, the stub for fluid statics is there. Cleverer people than me will complete the detail. Next step is to do fluid mechanics as per my suggestion Wikipedia:WikiProject Fluid dynamics/Top_draft. Comments please? Cutler 00:21, 15 Mar 2004 (UTC)
I moved this draft to the Fluid mechanics article. It's better to have it there than here, so that people can edit it in its natural habitat. COGDEN 03:05, Nov 27, 2004 (UTC)



I've worked a bit on the Aeroelasticity article. And I think this WikiProject sounds very good... let's make it active again? Milena 13:55, 13 September 2005 (UTC)

I agree, let's try and get this project running again Brendanfox 00:32, 23 January 2006 (UTC)


I have created {{Fluid}} and the relevant categories. Can anyone come up with an image to use and can we start tagging articles. I think this will (hopefully) mean that if people move into this section (or away from it) it will be easier to keep track of what has been done and what needs to be done. Is this a good idea, have you any feedback? Rex the first talk | contribs 23:11, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Pages needing attention

[edit] Physics

To add articles to one of the automatically updated lists, add the appropriate tag from Wikipedia:Cleanup resources, and make sure is it in a category on the "Categories covered" section, or an immediate subcategory thereof. (Feel free to add categories there if you think articles in that category and its immediate subcategories should be listed here.) There also still some manually-updated lists.