Effects of an external constant pressure gradient on a steady incompressible laminar flow through a semi-porous annular pipe

In this paper, we examine a steady laminar flow for an incompressible fluid located in a semi porous annular pipe and subjected to a favorable constant pressure gradient applied between the two borders of the pipe. The inner wall is impermeable and the fluid is sucked or injected at the outer wall at constant and uniform velocity, orthogonally to the wall. The problem under study depends on three parameters: the pipe gap ratio, the dimensionless external pressure gradient, and the Reynolds number defined from the sum of the suction or injection velocity and the maximum Hagen–Poiseuille velocity. The conservation of mass induces the zero-divergence velocity field which allows replacing the steady-flow Navier–Stokes equations with a single equation satisfied by the stream function and called the vorticity equation. Assuming the similarity-solution hypothesis, the problem under consideration is reduced to a fourth-order nonlinear ordinary differential equation with two boundary conditions at each wall. The numerical shooting technique including the Runge–Kutta algorithm and the Newton–Raphson optimization method is applied to obtain the solution for the steady flow. For various values of the dimensionless external pressure gradient, the profiles of the velocity components are found and investigations on the wall shear stress for both walls are performed. The results obtained are discussed and physical understandings for the problem studied are derived.

Patterns in Wall-Bounded Shear Flows

Experiments and numerical simulations have shown that turbulence in transitional wall-bounded shear flows frequently takes the form of long oblique bands if the domains are sufficiently large to accommodate them. These turbulent bands have been observed in plane Couette flow, plane Poiseuille flow, counter-rotating Taylor–Couette flow, torsional Couette flow, and annular pipe flow. At their upper Reynolds number threshold, laminar regions carve out gaps in otherwise uniform turbulence, ultimately forming regular turbulent–laminar patterns with a large spatial wavelength. At the lower threshold, isolated turbulent bands sparsely populate otherwise laminar domains, and complete laminarization takes place via their disappearance. We review results for plane Couette flow, plane Poiseuille flow, and free-slip Waleffe flow, focusing on thresholds, wavelengths, and mean flows, with many of the results coming from numerical simulations in tilted rectangular domains that form the minimal flow unit for the turbulent–laminar bands.