AI-powered
podcast player
Listen to all your favourite podcasts with AI-powered features
The Role of Reynolds in Fluid Dynamics
Inertial part of Navier-Stokes equations describes the nature of flows. The ratio of kind of the inertial term to the viscosity term is called the Reynolds number and that was some Oswald Reynolds right in the late 1800s. So again people studying fluid dynamics but I think Reynolds mostly observed that if you look at sort of a bigger but slower thing then it will have the same pattern of fluid flow as a faster but smaller thing. That's what tells you that an eddy that you start off in a fluid will keep going as an eddy. And for example roughly makes a big eddy tend to break up into smaller eddies and still smaller eddies until eventually