The objective of this study is to computationally investigate the vorticity generated by the wake of a (1) rotor blade and a (2) hydrofoil profile. The first flow is weakly compressible and is inspired by experiments carried out by Dr. Tinney at The University of Texas at Austin aimed at investigating the aeroacoustic effects of blade-vortex interactions. The second flowis inspired by experiments carried out by Dr. Irvine at the University of Chicago where a ring with a hydrofoil-shaped cross-section is pulled in water to create a coherent vortical structure. Simulations have been carried out with the high-order unstructured block-spectral code solverH3AMR. The rotor blade simulations have been performed at the nominal angle of attackof 7.4°where an unsteady vortical wake with quasi-periodic shedding was observed together with a surprising dependency of the lift coefficient on the thermal boundary conditions: the lift coefficient is predicted to increase from 0.96 to 1.14 when switching from adiabatic to isothermal no-slip conditions. The hydrofoil calculations were run with steady free-stream conditions (not matching the experiments) and showed massively separated flow on the suction side due to the high angle of attack.