Fluid Mechanics

The first carefully documented friction experiments in low-speed pipe flow were carried out independently in 1839 by the French physiologist Jean Leonard Marie Poiseuille, who was interested in the characteristics of blood flow, and in 1840 by the German hydraulic engineer Gotthilf Heinrich Ludwig Hagen. An attempt to include the effects of viscosity into the mathematical equations was made first in 1827 by the French engineer Claude Louis Marie Navier, and independently by the British mathematician Sir George Gabriel Stokes, who in 1845 perfected the basic equations for viscous incompressible fluids. These are now known as the Navier-Stokes equations, and they are so complex that they can be applied only to simple flows. One such flow is that of a real fluid through a straight pipe. Here Bernoulli’s principle is not applicable because part of the total mechanical energy is dissipated as a result of viscous friction, resulting in a pressure drop along the pipe. The equations suggest that this pressure drop for a given pipe and a given fluid should be linear with the flow velocity. Experiments first conducted near the middle of the 19th century showed that this was only true for low velocities; at higher velocities, the pressure drop was more nearly proportional to the square of the velocity. This problem was not resolved until 1883 when the British engineer Osborne Reynolds showed the existence of two types of viscous flows in pipes. At low velocities the fluid particles follow the streamlines (laminar flow) and results match the analytical prediction. At higher velocities the flow breaks up into a fluctuating velocity pattern or eddies (turbulent flow) in a form that cannot be fully predicted even today. Reynolds also established that the transition from laminar to turbulent flow was a function of a single parameter that has since become known as the Reynolds number. If the Reynolds number, which is the product of velocity, fluid density, and pipe diameter, divided by the fluid viscosity, is less than 2100, the pipe flow will always be laminar; at higher values it will normally be turbulent. The concept of a Reynolds number is basic to much of modern fluid mechanics.

Turbulent flows cannot be evaluated solely from computed predictions and depend on a mixture of experimental data and mathematical models for their analysis, with much of modern fluid-mechanics research still being devoted to better formulations of turbulence. The transitional nature from laminar to turbulent flows and the complexity of the turbulent flow can be observed as cigarette smoke rises into very still air. At first it rises in a laminar streamline motion but after some distance it becomes unstable and breaks up into an intertwining eddy pattern.

Before about 1860 the engineering interest in fluid mechanics was limited almost entirely to water flows. The development of the chemical industry during the latter part of the 19th century directed attention to other liquids and to gases. Interest in aerodynamics began with the studies of the German aeronautical engineer Otto Lilienthal in the last decade of the 19th century and saw major advances following the first successful powered flight by the American inventors Orville and Wilbur Wright in 1903.

The complexity of viscous flows, especially turbulent flows, severely restricted progress in fluid dynamics until the German engineer Ludwig Prandtl recognized in 1904 that many flows could be divided into two principal regions. The region close to the surface consists of a thin boundary layer where the viscous effects are concentrated and where the mathematical model can be greatly simplified. Outside the boundary layer viscous effects can be disregarded and the simpler mathematical equations for inviscid flows can be used. The boundary-layer theory has made possible much of the development of modern aircraft wings and the design of gas turbines and compressors. The boundary-layer model not only permitted a much simplified formulation of the Navier-Stokes equations in the region close to the body surface but also led to further developments of the flow of inviscid fluids that can be applied outside the boundary layer. Much of the modern development of fluid mechanics was made possible by the boundary-layer concept and it has been carried out by such key contributors as the Hungarian-born American aeronautical engineer Theodore von Kármán, and the German mathematician Richard von Mises, by the British physicist and meteorologist Sir Geoffrey Ingram Taylor.

Interest in compressible flows started with the development of steam turbines by the British inventor Charles Algernon Parsons, and the Swedish engineer Carl Gustaf Patrik de Laval during the 1880s. Here high-speed flow of steam within flow passages was first encountered and the need for efficient turbine design led to improved compressible flow analyses. Modern advances, however, had to wait for the stimulus of successful gas turbine and jet engine development in the 1930s. The early interest in high-speed flows over surfaces arose in the study of ballistics, for which an understanding of the motion of projectiles was needed. Major developments started near the end of the 19th century, involving Prandtl and his students, among others, and increased after the introduction of high-speed aircraft and rockets (see Rocket) in World War II.

One of the basic principles of compressible flows is that the density of a gas changes when the gas is subjected to large velocity and pressure changes. At the same time its temperature also changes, leading to more complex means of analysis. The flow behavior of a compressible gas depends on whether the flow velocity is smaller or greater than the velocity of sound. The velocity of sound is the name given to the propagation velocity of a very small disturbance, or pressure wave, within the fluid. For a gas it is proportional to the square root of the absolute temperature. For instance, air at 20° C, or 293° on the Kelvin, or absolute, scale (68° F), has a sound velocity of 344.65 m per sec (1130 ft per sec). If the flow velocity is less than the sound velocity (subsonic flow), pressure waves can be transmitted throughout the whole fluid to adjust the flow that rushes toward an object. Thus the subsonic flow approaching an airplane wing will adjust itself some distance upstream to flow smoothly over the surface. In supersonic flow, pressure waves cannot travel upstream to readjust the flow. As a result, the air rushing toward a wing in supersonic flight will not be prepared for the impending disturbance the wing will cause. Instead, it has to redirect very suddenly in the proximity of the wing, where a sharp compression or shock is coupled with the redirection. The noise associated with this sudden shock causes the sonic boom of aircraft flying at supersonic speeds. Compressible flows are often identified by the Mach number, which is the ratio of the flow velocity divided by the sound velocity. Supersonic flows therefore have a Mach number greater than 1.