AMUSE

Date: March 22, 2023

Time: 6:00PM - 7:00PM

Location: BLOC 306

Speaker: Matthias Maier, Texas A&M University

Title: Mathematical Modeling, Fluids, and Airplanes that Shouldn't Fly

Abstract: Flight has fascinated mankind for millennia. It was not until the beginning of the 20th century that "lift" could be used for the first heavier-than-air flight. Even though airplanes are nowadays a central tool of transportation, the notion of flight remains a fascinating topic with a number of questions still unresolved today. In this talk we will examine a classical theory of flight based on "potential flows." These are flows that can be described (in 2D) as a complex-valued function defined on the complex number plane. Based on this representation we will derive two fundamental theorems for potential flow, Blasius' Thorem and the Kutta-Joukowsky Theorem, that describe the "lift" of a body in potential flow.