To develop physical intuition about fluids and fluid flows and use it to analyze examples from everyday life, astrophysics, geophysics, biophysics, engineering, and elsewhere.
Tuesday Thursday 11.30-1pm, Wong 1050 (first class Thursday January 5th)
Prof. Andrew Cumming, Rutherford Physics Building room 310, [email protected]
Depending on the time available, the topics covered will include
The emphasis will be on understanding the basic physical ideas and applying them to fluid flows in astrophysics, geophysics, biophysics, and elsewhere.
This will be a highly interactive class, with assigned readings to do at home and class time devoted to pedagogical discussions and problem solving, including both analytic and computational exercises.
The course will be organized around a different topic each week. A set of notes will be provided each Thursday for the following week. You should read the notes before coming to class on Tuesday. The first part of Tuesday’s class will involve answering some pedagogical questions about the material covered in the notes, as well as answering any questions that come up while you were reading the notes. The remainder of the Tuesday and Thursday classes will be used for in class problem solving. In particular, Thursday’s class will involve numerical exercises.
A write up of a subset of the week’s problems will be handed in as homework. The homework will be due by the Thursday of the following week. No late homeworks will be accepted.
The grade will be assigned as follows:
Textbooks
There are many, many books on fluid mechanics to look at, here are some suggestions:
Other links
Made in the 1960s, National Committee for Fluid Mechanics Films are an excellent introduction to a variety of topics in fluids (and the slightly dated presentation makes them fun to watch, highly recommended).
FYFD has many interesting examples. The classic Album of Fluid Motion (M. van Dyke, Editor, Parabolic Press 1982) has many images of different fluid flows.
Project ideas
Image credits
The images above show (1) an outflow from a young star observed by the Spitzer Space Telescope, (2) a figure illustrating different ways to swim in a viscous fluid, from the classic article Life at low Reynolds number by Purcell, (3) a wake trailing a boat in Saguenay Fjord, (4) the Lorenz attractor as integrated in one of the problem sets in the course, and (5) hurricane Katrina from NASA’s hurricane resource page.
McGill University values academic integrity. Therefore all students must understand the meaning and consequences of cheating, plagiarism and other academic offences under the Code of Student Conduct and Disciplinary Procedures (more information). In accord with McGill University's Charter of Students' Rights, students in this course have the right to submit in English or in French any written work that is to be graded. In the event of extraordinary circumstances beyond the University's control, the content and/or evaluation scheme in this course is subject to change. Additional policies governing academic issues which affect students can be found in the McGill Charter of Students' Rights.