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In order to deal with complex potentials, you need to know some
important facts about complex numbers:
- Parts
- If any complex number z is written in the form
where x and y are both real, then the real part of
z is . Similarly the imaginary part is . What are the real and imaginary parts of the complex streamfunction
for ideal stagnation point flow, ?
- Complex conjugate
- To get the complex conjugate number,
replace everywhere by . Example: :
:
What is the complex conjugate of the complex streamfunction
for ideal stagnation point flow, ?
- Magnitude
- To get the magnitude of a complex number, multiply by
the conjugate and take the square root:
What is the magnitude of the complex streamfunction
for stagnation point flow, ?
Note: z2 is not a positive real number if z is complex.
For complex numbers, only is always a positive real number.
- Inverse
- To clean up the inverse of a complex number, try multiplying
top and bottom with its complex conjugate.
What is ?
- Euler
- An exponential with a purely imaginary argument can be written:
Verify this by writing out the Taylor series for the exponential.
- Polar form
- Any complex number z can be written in polar form as:
where real number r is the magnitude of z
and real number is the argument of z.
- Multiplication
- Multiplying a complex number with a real number a magnifies
the number by a: . Multiplying a complex
number by rotates the number counter-clockwise over
an angle : .
Application to finding the polar velocity components:
From the graph:
Taking the complex conjugate:
What are the polar velocity components of ideal stagnation point flow,
with complex streamfunction ?
- Logarithm
- If is any complex number,
where . What is the logarithm of the complex streamfunction
for ideal stagnation point flow, ?
You should now be able to do 18.4
Next: Simplest Examples
Up: Introduction
Previous: Differentiability