On the refracted patterns produced by liquid vortices

摘要

A theoretical analysis of the refracted shad-ows produced by steady and time-decaying liquid vor-tices under uniform illumination from above is givenin this article.An expression for the induced shadowintensity is derived and found to be a function of thevortex's free surface profile,i.e.,function of the staticpressure distribution.The patterns for different focus-ing depth are given and compared with previous visu-alization results from the literature.The phenomenonis examined and illustrated as a bench mark case byusing both steady and time-decaying algebraic vortexmodels.However,this study can be extended to checkthe feasibility of recovering the main flow properties byanalyzing the luminous image intensity of the refractedpatterns.The present analysis is valid only when the swirlvelocity is order of magnitude higher than the meridi-onal flow components and the vorticity is concentratedwithin the core region and of intense conditions.