One way to discover ideal flows is; to solve Laplace's equation for either the stream function or the potential function. The stream function is preferable for the following reason: The tangent vectors on the level curves of the stream function (called streamlines) point in the direction of the velocity vector field V at all points (Figure 2) This means that the streamlines show the direction in which the fluid moves Prove that the vectors tangent to the streamlines are aligned with the vector field Ideal fluid flow Topics and skills: Vector fields, partial derivatives, graphing Fluid dynamics deals with the motion of materials that flow. For this reason, fluid dynamics provides the equations that describe the motion of oceans, hurricanes, lava flows, and air around the wing of a supersonic jet. The usual starting point for fluid dynamics is ideal flow. As the name implies, ideal flows are often not very realistic (the physicist Richard Feynman claimed that ideal flow applies only to "dry water"). However, ideal We consider two-dimensional flows in which the velocity vector describing the motion of the fluid at a point (x, y) is You can think of it as the east-west component of velocity and v as the north-south component (Figure 1). Two-dimensional models describe either very shallow flows or flows in which there is no variation in depth.