As I read in The Road to Reality by Roger Penrose, the Joukowsky transform $$w(z) = \frac12\left( z + \frac1z \right)$$ after Nikolai Zhukovsky (transcribed in several versions from Никола́й Его́рович Жуко́вский) can be used to calculate the flow of a non-viscious, incompressible and irrotational flow around an airfoil.
This can be done since the solution of a potential flow around a cylinder is known in full analyticity and the given transform conformally maps a circle on an airfoil-like geometry. I don't understand this argumentation, so:
How is the Joukowsky Transform used to calculate the Flow of an Airfoil?
An example of such a transformation is given in the mentioned Wikipedia article:
Thank you in advance.
Answer
The crux of the argument is that we can treat complex analytic (holomorphic) functions as functions in 2D, and their real and imaginary parts (separately) are solutions of Laplace's equation ($\nabla^2 \psi = 0$), due to the Cauchy-Riemann condition. Conformal maps such as the one you cite map analytic functions to analytic functions, i.e generate new solutions from old ones. Thus, by knowing a trivial solution (such as around the cylinder), we can generate the flow around a new object by finding a conformal map to it.
Relevant details:
Laplace's equation solves potential flow problems: incompressible, inviscid, curl-free flow (though we are allowed rotational flow around finite objects --- the resulting singularity is technically outside of the domain).
We can somewhat relax the need for fully holomorphic functions.
Such mappings tend to mess up your boundary conditions at infinity --- so it may be quite hard in general to find such mappings.
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