On knotted streamtubes in incompressible hydrodynamical flow and a restricted conserved quantity

Abstract

For certain families of fluid flow, a new conserved quantity -- stream-helicity -- has been established.Using examples of linked and knotted streamtubes, it has been shown that stream-helicity does, in certain cases, entertain itself with a very precise topological meaning viz, measure of the degree of knottedness or linkage of streamtubes.As a consequence, stream-helicity emerges as a robust topological invariant.