This post is not meant to be an exhaustive dive into potential flow; it is only meant as an introduction to incompressible potential flow and how we can use potential flow theory to get simplified solutions to some otherwise complicated problems.
When solving complex problems in aerodynamics, we can start with the most general equations we know, for instance, the Navier-Stokes equations (which themselves already have a couple of assumptions built in, but are not very limiting). These equations require detailed numerical solutions, so we would like to simplify them down by making some more valid assumptions. We will be making two assumptions here:
- Irrotational flow (angular velocity/vorticity is zero)
- Incompressible flow (density is constant)