Potential Flow Field around an Ellipse**

[Trenthan]

Ey guys

Just wondering if anyone knows of any theory's that can be used to create a potential field around an ellipse in non uniform flow???

I would have used a full Rankine body, but that requires uniform flow so it wont work in non uniform flow.

I looked at various theorem's like the "Circle Theorem", and modifications of it. Nothing for ellipses as far as i could find, evening stretching the search to IEEE etc.

Looked briefly at conformal transformations, tried some modeling as well no real luck.

Starting to struggle with idea's, and places to hunt, hence the post.

Any idea's, recommendations or even a hint of where to look???
I'm happy to do the footwork, just looking for some bread crumbs i could follow, that may lead me to a solution.

Cheers Trent

[JaredJames]

Not sure if this is completely relevant, but here is a paper on flow around elipses:

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ie100251w

[RandomGuy88]

Have you tried using a panel method?

How exactly is the flow non-uniform?

[minger]

I have cited a paper from a long time ago (20s maybe) by a man named Joukowski, for which the airfoil is named. He used potential theory to come up with exact solutions for all sorts of airfoil conditions (pitching, plunging, etc). He used a complex transform of a circle to do this all. Since an ellipse is a transform of a circle, then perhaps similar methods could be used to find solutions.