Introduction

The flow considered in this chapter is assumed to be steady, incompressible, inviscid, and irrotational. The body immersed in the flow is assumed to be a body of revolution at zero angle of attack. An understanding of incompressible flow around bodies of revolution at zero or small angle of attack is important in several practical applications, including airships, aircraft and cruise-missile fuselages, submarine hulls, and torpedoes, as well as flows around aircraft engine nacelles and inlets. This type of flow problem is best handled in cylindrical coordinates (x, r), as shown in Fig. 7.1. Recall that r and θ lie in the y-z plane.

Because the flow fields discussed in this chapter are axisymmetric, the flow properties depend on only the axial distance x from the nose of the body (assumed to be at the origin in most cases) and the radial distance, r, away from this axis of symmetry. The flow properties are independent of the angle θ. As a result, we may examine the flow in any (x-r) plane because the flow in all such planes is identical due to the axial symmetry. It is convenient to develop the defining equations initially in cylindrical coordinates (i.e., dependence on x, r, and θ) and then to simplify them for axisymmetric flow (i.e., dependence on x, r only).