Hamiltonian Fluid Dynamics

In this final chapter, we return to the subject of the first: the fundamental principles of fluid mechanics. In chapter 1, we derived the equations of fluid motion from Hamilton’s principle of stationary action, emphasizing its logical simplicity and the resulting close correspondence between mechanics and thermodynamics. Now we explore the Hamiltonian approach more fully, discovering its other advantages. The most important of these advantages arise from the correspondence between the symmetry properties of the Lagrangian and the conservation laws of the resulting dynamical equations. Therefore, we begin with a very brief introduction to symmetry and conservation laws. Noether’s theorem applies to the equations that arise from variational principles like Hamilton’s principle. According to Noether’s theorem : If a variational principle is invariant to a continuous transformation of its dependent and independent variables, then the equations arising from the variational principle possess a divergence-form conservation law. The invariance property is also called a symmetry property. Thus Noether’s theorem connects symmetry properties and conservation laws. We shall neither state nor prove the general form of Noether’s theorem; to do so would require a lengthy digression on continuous groups. Instead we illustrate the connection between symmetry and conservation laws with a series of increasingly complex and important examples. These examples convey the flavor of the general theory. Our first example is very simple. Consider a body of mass m moving in one dimension. The body is attached to the end of a spring with spring-constant K. Let x(t) be the displacement of the body from its location when the spring is unstretched.