220 Fundamentals of Fluid Mechanics and Transport Phenomena
),...,1,(;0
11
pjiA
xx
A
jiij
ji
ij
w
w
w
w
DD
[[
[5.37]
The left-hand side of equation [5.37] is a quadratic form which represents the
equation of a second degree cone comprising the normals to the characteristic
surfaces. If it is imaginary, we have an
elliptic equation
. If on the other hand it is
real, the equation is
hyperbolic
. The preceding equation, which is easy to write,
allows us to reduce our study of the type of a differential equation to the
identification of the nature of a quadratic form. Instead of searching for the principal
directions and performing an orthogonal change of reference frame, we can follow
the simpler procedure of directly identifying a reduced form for this quadratic form.
We will look at some applications in the next section.
The compatibility relation of equation [5.36] can be written for the solutions of
[5.37]:
),...,2(
),...,1,(
0,..,,
2
pk
pji
g
ff
f
kii
¸
¸
¹
·
¨
¨
©
§
ww
w
w
w
[[[
\
5.3.5. Applications
5.3.5.1.
Quasi-linear partial differential equation
We will apply the preceding results to the flow of an inviscid fluid, limiting
ourselves to the identification of characteristic surfaces for the two-variable
examples already studied.
We immediately recover the results of section 5.2, by applying the preceding
results to equation [5.3]. Characteristic equation [5.37] can be written:
0
111
w
w
w
w
w
w
y
v
x
u
t
[[[
Its solutions
0,,
11
yxt
are equations of surfaces comprising the
trajectories (the equation shows in effect that the surface normals are normal to the
vector (1,
u
,
v
) which is thus situated in the tangent plane of the surface).
5.3.5.2.
System of partial differential equations with two independent variables
The characteristic curves obtained in section 5.3.1 can also be found using
characteristic equation [5.34]. This can be written as: