TY  - JOUR
AU  - Ekkehard Holzbecher
PY  - 2024
DA  - 2024/07/30
TI  - Visualization of Potential Flow: Dealing with the Branch Cuts
JO  - Japan Journal of Research
VL  - 5
IS  - 6
AB  - The theory of potential flow is important in several application fields, in particular: in aero dynamics,
fluid dynamics, electrostatics, porous media flow. In the classical approach flow is described by a
potential function of the complex plane into the complex plane. Using potential function contouring the
visualizing of streamlines in flow nets can reveal important characteristics of the flow in question, for
which alternative methods fail. However, branch cuts of important potential functions pose a problem
for the visual representation. Here methods are outlined how to deal with the problem: (1) to be aware
that equalities, common in real number algebra, may not hold in the complex number space; (2) to
partition the complex plane into sub-domains on which the functions are evaluated sequentially. The
description of the methods uses superpositions of complex logarithms as examples, but the ideas can be
adopted for the visualisation to other potentials as well.
SN  - 2690-8077
UR  - https://dx.doi.org/10.33425/2690-8077.1124
DO  - 10.33425/2690-8077.1124