Viscous and inviscid simulations of the start-up vortex

Abstract

Inviscid, unsteady simulations of the roll up of the start-up vortex issuing from a semi-infinite plate are compared with previous simulations of the viscous flow. The inviscid equations were solved by a lumped-vortex method, the two-dimensional, incompressible Navier–Stokes equations in the vorticity–streamfunction formulation modelled the viscous problem. The purpose is to verify whether the irregular behaviour found by the inviscid solution well approximates the unstable evolution of the viscous spiral vortex in the limit of infinitely large time (or equivalently Reynolds number).