VORTICITY TRANSPORT EQUATION FROM NAVIER-STOKES

EQUATION FOR 2D-FLOW WITH BODY FORCES.

(BY ELIMINATING PRESSURE TERMS)

It isn’t always easy to remember the Navier-Stokes (NS) equations, even in their compact
vector notation. Fortunately, they can be expressed in an even more compact way. In this
school work, I will derive the vorticity transport equation of the two-dimensional NS
equations. The three scalar NS equations for a two-dimensional incompressible flow can be
reduced to a single equation (apart from the definition of vorticity) with this equation. I will
assume that body forces act on the fluid and they are conservative and I’ll be showing how
this simplifies the equation even further.

In the vorticity transport equation, the variables are the stream function and the vorticity
. The stream function is defined such that and . It is unique up to an additive
constant since the velocity is divergence-less. The vorticity is defined as

Let us begin with the three NS equations which describe two-dimensional incompressible
flows.

Our first task is to eliminate pressure from these three equations. In order to do this, let us
differentiate the x-momentum equation w.r.t. y and the y-momentum equation w.r.t. x and
subtract one from the other. We get,

Subtracting and identifying as , we get

Using the compact vector notation,

If the body forces are conservative, the second term on the RHS vanishes and we have,

We can go on and make this even more compact and write,

Where is the total derivative operator. In non-dimensional form, this becomes

The above equation describes the transport of vorticity and hence, is called the vorticity
transport equation. Together with the definition of vorticity, these equations are called the
stream function-vorticity equations. The vorticity transport equation immediately leads an
important physical interpretation, namely, the vorticity of an inviscid flow ( ) is
conserved along the flow. In particular, an inviscid flow that is irrotational remains
irrotational for all time. The vorticity equation is useful to analyze inviscid flows since it is
exactly integrable. For viscous flows, it can be solved using a finite element method.
However, the specification of boundary conditions for the vorticity at no-slip boundaries is a
difficult problem.

The term “Navier-Stokes equations” is often used for both the mass and momentum
conservation equations. Technically, only the momentum conservation equations for a
Newtonian fluid are called “Navier-Stokes equations”. The term “The complete Navier-
Stokes equations” is used to indicate this distinction.

In its general form, the vorticity transport equation does not assume that the flow is
incompressible or that the fluid is Newtonian.