Deriving Vorticity Equation from Navier-Stokes

Equation.
 
Consider the two-dimensional flow of a homogenous and incompressible
fluid. The density and the viscosity of the fluid are both assumed to be
uniform. We assume that any body forces on the fluid are derived as a
gradient of a scalar function. The governing equations for the motion of the
fluid are the conservation of mass and linear momentum .
The mass conservation equation is
 
(2.1)
where
 
is the velocity and
is the gradient operator. We also denote to be any point in
the plane and and to be the unit vectors along the axes.
The linear momentum conservation for a Newtonian fluid is given by the
Navier-Stokes equations,
 

where
is time;
is mechanical pressure;
is body force per unit mass of the fluid;
is kinematic viscosity, defined as the ratio of the dynamic viscosity
and the density of the fluid and,
is the Laplacian operator.
The equation for the the evolution of vorticity can be derived from the
Navier-Stokes equations . To do that, we first define the vorticity
to be the curl of the flow velocity,

 
    
For two-dimensional flows, the vorticity vector is normal to the plane of
the flow; that is,

where,

is an unit vector normal to the plane. The vorticity equation is obtained by

taking the curl of and it is given by:
 

 
The physical interpretation of each of the terms in the vorticity equation is
the basis for the formulation of vortex methods. On the right hand side of
the first term represents the transport of vorticity due to the velocity
(convection process), and the second term represents the change in
vorticity due to viscosity (diffusion process) . Truesdell has described the
convection and diffusion processes in detail from a kinematic point of
view.
To solve for a particular problem, initial and boundary conditions must be
specified. The initial vorticity field may be prescribed or it may also be
derived as the curl of a specified initial velocity field. Boundary conditions
must be specified when there are boundaries in a flow. On a solid
impermeable boundary, the velocity of the fluid on the boundary must be
the same as the velocity of the boundary itself,
 

   
where
is any point on the boundary and,
is the velocity of the boundary. Notice that the boundary condition
is in terms of velocity and not vorticity; we will discuss the handling
of this boundary condition in section. Further, in many applications the
flow domain is unbounded and at large distances the velocity is either
uniform or vanishes; hence the vorticity vanishes at large distances
also.
 
Vortex methods are based on the Lagrangian approach in which the ``fluid
particles" are used as the basic computational elements. Here the fluid
particles are understood to be small volumes of fluid. To be precise,
particles are volumes of fluid that are much smaller than all relevant length
scales of the flow but still much larger than the molecular size and mean
free-path length. The time derivative following a fluid particle is defined as
 

   
In terms of this ``Lagrangian time-derivative", we can rewrite the vorticity
equation as,
 

   
According to, the vorticity of a fluid particle changes only due to diffusion.
In inviscid flows

the vorticity of a fluid particle does not change; this result is very useful in
formulating vortex methods
However, the vorticity equation is only one equation for three unknowns,
, ,