Question

So I was thinking about this while driving home the other day.

I've never been quite clear on why when you drive with the windows down air rushes into your car. I thought this might be explained by Bernoulli's equation for incompressible flow, but I ran into what seems to be a contradiction. If we consider the problem from the reference of the car, the air in the car is stationary and the air outside the car has a certain velocity. Then, Bernoulli's equation implies the pressure outside the car is lower than that inside the car. However, if we take the reference frame of the road, the air in the car is moving and then the pressure in side the car is lower. Intuitively, this second situation seems to be correct since air apparently flows into the car (from high pressure to low pressure). However there seems to be a contradiction, as the pressure gradient depends on reference frame. So my question is what has gone wrong here? Is this a situation in which bernoulli's principle simply isn't applicable? Did I make some sort of mistake in my application of the principle? Any help is appreciated. Thanks.

Answer 1

Bernoulli's equation is frame-dependent as the following paper shows it in a nice way

The Bernoulli equation in a moving reference frame

PDF here

The essence of the argument is to realize that in a frame where the obstacles, around which the fluid moves, are not stationary, these surfaces do non-zero work. And one must account for this work done when using the Bernoulli equation.

A better way is to look at the generalized Bernoulli equation as done here, which also covers viscous fluids.