This is the flow as it evolves in time. The blue, turquoise, and green lines are trajectories traced out by three fluid particles.  Although at a given instant, streamlines and trajectories are both tangent to the velocity vector, in a nonsteady flow  the trajectories may deviate significantly from the streamlines over even a short interval of time. In this instance, the  trajectories are cycloids and look nothing like the streamlines.

Vortex, flow, and streamlines

The MATLAB source code for these animations can be found here (warning: somewhat unreadable as of this time) and uses a subroutine written by Zhenhai Wang.


References:

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Last edited 17 Nov 03