Whether it’s water flowing across a condenser plate in an industrial plant, or air whooshing through heating and cooling ducts, the flow of fluid across flat surfaces is a phenomenon at the heart of many of the processes of modern life. Yet, aspects of this process have been poorly understood, and some have been taught incorrectly to generations of engineering students, a new analysis shows.
The study examined several decades of published research and analysis on fluid flows. It found that, while most undergraduate textbooks and classroom instruction in heat transfer describe such flow as having two different zones separated by an abrupt transition, in fact there are three distinct zones. A lengthy transitional zone is just as significant as the first and final zones, the researchers say.
The discrepancy has to do with the shift between two different ways that fluids can flow. When water or air starts to flow along a flat, solid sheet, a thin boundary layer forms. Within this layer, the part closest to the surface barely moves at all because of friction, the part just above that flows a little faster, and so on, until a point where it is moving at the full speed of the original flow. This steady, gradual increase in speed across a thin boundary layer is called laminar flow. But further downsteam, the flow changes, breaking up into the chaotic whirls and eddies known as turbulent flow.
Source: “Understanding how fluids heat or cool surfaces”, David L. Chandler, MIT News Office