Aerodynamics at USYD was genuinely one of my favourite courses in the degree, and I’ve gone on to engage with lots of extra-curricular research in the field because of just how much I enjoyed it. With that being said, it is also notoriously difficult, with one of the highest fail rates. As a student taking the course, a large part reason is the difficult mathematical concepts being mapped onto invisible phenomena. Vector calculus and complex analysis are difficult concepts to visualise in their own right, and the difficult is exacerbated as it is not immediately clear why these concepts are being used for flowfields in the first place. At the time of writing, I am currently in talks with USYD’s Aerodynamics 1 course coordinator regarding the integration of my resources into the course and joining the teaching team.

As such, I was inspired to provide future cohorts with a more coherent experience, partially because I relate to the struggle of the course, and also because I want to provide others with the opportunity to understand the beauty of this field of study. For those of you familiar, one of my biggest inspirations is 3Blue1Brown. He is a large reason for my sustained interest in mathematics, and I felt that his style of animated visual explanation would be perfect for the concepts in aerodynamics, specifically potential flow theory. His channel doesn’t seem to feature much in the way of vector calculus so far either, let alone its application to aerodynamics, so it felt like a valuable niche to fill.

And to round it all off, I enjoy teaching, and I actually really like scripting, narrating, and editing videos. And I reckon I’m pretty good at both.

3Blue1Brown uses his own python library, Manim, to make the visualisations for his videos. He shares the source code for it publically, however, makes frequent changes and does not have the time for extensive documentation. As such, his community has created, and maintains, Manim Community Edition, which is a more stable version with more thorough documentation, and is the version I am using for the visuals.

Although Manim technically has the capability to produce videos in their entirety, being able to directly record voice-overs and transition between scenes, I am much more comfortable with doing these things externally. I record and clean my audio in Audacity, and my video editing software of choice is DaVinci Resolve. I am unsure if the same quality is achievable through Manim alone, and I am certain that I wouldn’t be able to achieve comparable quality without introducing these two additional programs into my workflow.

Apart from that, the “methodology” of this project would simply be the mathematics behind potential flow theory and its foundational concepts. You can probably just learn about it yourself if you’re really that keen. Or maybe drop by USYD’s AERO3260 (Aerodynamics 1) class and check them out for yourself :).

I would love to show more than just the demo reel below, like my full script, storyboarding, and of course more of the video, however since this work is going to be integrated into USYD’s teaching material, I must refrain from sharing it publicly. However, I’ll share the following information about the first video:

• Topics covered: Navier-Stokes Equations, simplified 2-D potential flow system, vector calculus, velocity potential, stream function, numerical examples of each
• Script length: 4000 words
• Final voice-over length: 25 minutes