Advanced Physical Fluid Dynamics

In this undergraduate Lecture, we wish to establish the fundamental equations that we hope will enable us to understand how fluids (gas and liquids) behave in various circumstances.

Fluid mechanics can be extremely difficult and equations highly involved. Nevertheless, fluid dynamics is also an everyday life phenomenon. Anyone has already observed most of the particular flows we would like to explain: laminar and turbulent flows, vortices, perhaps also some instabilities (e.g. solitons such as a 'mascaret'); you may also have noticed what is called a 'Kármán vortex street', and heard manifestations of it. Etc. Fluid dynamics is everywhere as soon as a gas or a liquid is present.

We will only graze topics such as turbulence or finite amplitude waves in fluids. Nevertheless, we will have introductions to these two exciting phenomena. Turbulence will be presented through the classical Kolmogorov'41 theory, while steepening of finite amplitude sound waves (leading to a shock) will be studied qualitatively. These topics are also necessary to anyone looking forward to study astrophysics.

The lectures are in french, but all slides, problems, articles, references, etc… are in English.

All the lecture material is available here (login required).