A numerical investigation of the rolling-up of vortex sheets

Abstract

In this paper the development of a vortex sheet due to an initially sinusoidal disturbance is calculated. When determining the induced velocity in points of the vortex sheet, it can be represented by concentrated vortices but it is shown that it is analytically more correct to add an additional term that represents the effect of the immediate neighbourhood of the point considered. The equations of motion were integrated by a Runge-Kutta technique to exclude numerical instabilities. The time step was determined by the requirement that a quantity (Hamiltonian) that remains invariant as a result of the equations of motion, should not change more than a certain amount in the numerical integration of the equations of motion. One difficulty is that if a greater number of concentrated vortices are introduced to represent the vortex sheet, the effect of round-off errors becomes more important. The number of figures retained in the computations limits the number of concentrated vortices. Where the round-off errors have been kept sufficiently small, a process of rolling-up of vorticity clearly occurs. There is no point in pursuing the calculations much beyond this point, first because the representation of the vortex sheet by concentrated vortices becomes more and more inaccurate and secondly because viscosity will have the effect of transforming the rolled-up vortex sheet into a region of vorticity.