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Stokes flow through a twisted tube

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 October 2006

C. POZRIKIDIS
Affiliation:
Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093-0411, USAcpozrikidis@ucsd.edu

Abstract

Pressure-driven flow through a tube with helical corrugations produced either by twisting a straight tube with arbitrary cross-section, or by embossing helical corrugations on a circular tube, or by inserting a helical fin inside a circular tube, is considered. The Stokes-flow problem is formulated in non-orthogonal curvilinear helical coordinates defined with respect to the helical pitch and azimuthal wavenumber, where the latter is determined by the tube cross-section rotational symmetry. In the first part of the paper, a perturbation analysis is carried out for a circular tube with small-amplitude sinusoidal corrugations, and the solutions of the first- and second-order perturbation problems are found by analytical methods. In the second part, an asymptotic analysis is performed for large-pitched helical corrugations and tubes with arbitrary cross-section, and the solutions of the zeroth-, first- and second-order problems are computed by finite-element methods for unidirectional and two-dimensional Stokes flow over the cross-sectional plane normal to the tube axis. The results illustrate the kinematic structure of the flow and demonstrate the dependence of the flow rate on the tube geometry.

Type
Papers
Copyright
© 2006 Cambridge University Press

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