Spreadsheet Modelling in Fluid Mechanics

Over the last fifteen years, the advent of the spreadsheet in computing has had a huge impact on fields where numerical computations are required, most notably in finance and computing.  However, with the continued development in computational power and graphical capabilities of spreadsheets, new possibilities are opened for their application in the mathematical modelling of physical simulations.

This project is an investigation of one such application; the modelling of two-dimensional irrotational flow in fluid mechanics.  A simple problem is proposed, that of ideal flow over a cylindrical obstruction, which is analysed and solved theoretically by means of conformal mapping. This analytic solution is modelled using the spreadsheet Excel V, the suitability of which is considered and compared to the more conventional use of computer algebra packages.