Viscous vortical flows (Q1188948)

The lecture note is composed of four chapters preceded by an extensive introduction in which the contents of each chapter are summarized section by section. In the first chapter we formulate the mathematical problem of a vortex-dominated viscous flow as an initial value problem for the incompressible Navier-Stokes (N-S) equations in an unbounded domain with an initial vorticity field. Some general properties of the solutions are presented, namely, the consistency conditions on the moments of vorticity, and their relationships to the far field representations of the vector and scalar potentials of velocity. In the second chapter we study the motion of slender vortex filaments with small diffusive core structures, using the method of matched asymptotics. Details of the analyses were reported in a sequence of four papers which began in 1965 with the relative simple two dimensional problem and ended in 1978 with the three dimensional problems of slender vortex filaments with large axial and circumferential velocities in their cores. Here we emphasize the scalings, or rather the intuition, leading to the general scheme of the asymptotic analysis and the physical interpretation of the solutions. Also we present some recent studies on the practical region of validity of the asymptotic solutions. In the third chapter we study the merging of the core structures of vortices by numerical solution of the N-S equations. We explain our numerical schemes and how the asymptotic and numerical methods can complement each other in the solution for the entire flow field. In the last chapter we mention several new problem areas.