Fluid Mechanics in Sommerfeld's School

Sommerfeld's affiliation with fluid mechanics started when he began his career as an assistant of the mathematician Felix Klein at Göttingen. He always regarded fluid mechanics as a particular challenge. In 1904, he published a theory of hydrodynamic lubrication. Four years later, he conceived...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Eckert, Michael
Format: Book Chapter
Language:English
Subjects:
Biography
Computational fluid dynamics
Fluid flow
Fluid mechanics
Heisenberg
Hopf
Laminar
Lectures
Lubrication
Noether
Pupils
Sommerfeld
Turbulence
Turbulent flow
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Summary:Sommerfeld's affiliation with fluid mechanics started when he began his career as an assistant of the mathematician Felix Klein at Göttingen. He always regarded fluid mechanics as a particular challenge. In 1904, he published a theory of hydrodynamic lubrication. Four years later, he conceived an approach for the analysis of flow instability (the Orr-Sommerfeld approach) as an attempt to account for the transition from laminar to turbulent flow. The onset of turbulence also became a major challenge for some of his pupils, in particular Ludwig Hopf and Fritz Noether. Both contributed considerably to elaborate the Orr-Sommerfeld theory. Heisenberg's doctoral work was another attempt in this quest. When Sommerfeld published his lectures on theoretical physics during World War II, he dedicated one of the six volumes to the mechanics of continuous media. With chapters on boundary layer theory and turbulence, it exceeded the scope of contemporary theoretical physics-revealing Sommerfeld's persistent appreciation of fluid mechanics. He resorted to Prandtl's Göttingen school of fluid mechanics in order to stay abreast of the rapid development of these specialties.
ISSN:0066-4189
1545-4479
DOI:10.1146/annurev-fluid-010814-014534