Results are presented of experimental observations made during investigation of the basic causes of vortex formation which show that air ingestion and vortex formation phenomena can be divided into three regimes corresponding to three ranges of submergence.
Simple theoretical modelling of the flow in which the suction pipe is replaced by a point sink, shows that the occurrence of vortex formation is associated with the behaviour of the surface stagnation point.
The theoretical results are compared with the extensive experimental data of Denny (4).
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