Let us introduce the symbols
to denote a variation of the trajectory
. Thus:
And thus according to equation (
9):
An "ideal fluid" is defined by the fact that the "fluid element" does exchange mass, nor electric charge, nor heat with other elements, or in a variational form:
According to thermodynamics a change in the internal energy of a "fluid element" satisfies the equation below in the particle’s rest frame:
In the above the first term describes the heating of the "fluid element" while the second term is a manifestation the work done by the "fluid element" on neighbouring elements.
denotes the temperature of the "fluid element" in the rest frame, and
is the pressure of the same. As the rest mass of the fluid element does not change and does not depend on any specific frame we may divide the above expression by
to derive the variation of the specific energy:
is the specific entropy of the fluid element in its rest frame. It follows that (we suppress the indices
below):
Another useful thermodynamic quantity is the Enthalpy defined for a fluid element in its rest frame as:
and the specific enthalpy:
Combining the above with equation (
30) we obtain the useful property:
Moreover:
For an ideal fluid, we neglect heat conduction and radiation, and thus only convection is considered. Thus
and it follows that:
Let us now establish some relations between the rest frame and any other frame in which the fluid element is in motion (this frame is sometimes denoted the "laboratory" frame). First we notice that at the rest frame there is no velocity (by definition), hence according to equation (
9):
It is well known that the four volume is Lorentz invariant, hence:
Thus:
Moreover, the action given in equation (
17) is Lorentz invariant, thus:
We can now vary the internal energy of a fluid element:
Taking into account equation (
35) and equation (
37) we obtain:
Thus using the definition of enthalpy given in equation (
31) we may write:
We shall now vary the volume element. At time
t the volume of the fluid element is:
The Jacobian relates this to the same element at
:
is calculated with respect to the
coordinates of the fluid elements:
Thus:
The variation of
J can thus be derived as:
Now:
Thus:
So the variation of the internal energy of equation (
42) can be written as:
Taking into account equation (
26) this takes the form:
The variation of internal energy is the only new calculation with respect to the calculation done for a system of particles described previously, thus the rest of the analysis is trivial. Varying equation (
17) we thus obtain:
We can now combine the internal and kinetic parts of the varied Lagrangian taking into account the specific enthalpy definition given in equation (
32):
The electromagnetic interaction variation terms are not different than in the low speed (non-relativistic) case, see for example equations A47 and A48 of [
1], and their derivation will not be repeated here:
and:
Introducing the shorthand notation:
The variation of the action of a relativistic fluid element is:
The variation of the relativistic fluid action is thus:
Now according to equation (
20) we may write:
using the above relations we may turn the
integral into a volume integral and thus write the variation of the fluid action in which we suppress the
labels:
in the above we introduced the Lorentz force density:
Now, since:
and using Gauss theorem the variation of the action can be written as:
It follows that the variation of the action will vanish for a
such that
and vanishing on a surface encapsulating the fluid, but other than that arbitrary only if the Euler equation for a relativistic charged fluid is satisfied, that is:
for the particular case that the fluid element is made of identical microscopic particles each with a mass
m and a charge
e, it follows that the mass and charge densities are proportional to the number density
n:
thus except from the terms related to the internal energy the equation is similar to that of a point particle. For a neutral fluid one obtains the form:
Some authors prefer to write the above equation in terms of the energy per element of the fluid per unit volume in the rest frame which is the sum of the internal energy contribution and the rest mass contribution:
It is easy to show that:
And using the above equality and some manipulations we may write equation (
66) in a form which is preferable by some authors:
In practical fluid dynamics a fluid is described in terms of localized quantities, instead of quantities related to unseen infinitesimal "fluid elements". This is the Eulerian description of fluid dynamics in which one uses flow fields rather than "fluid elements" as will be discussed below.