Carter, E. J.
Description:
The thesis is concerned with a theoretical study of
the flow behaviour of inelastic power law fluids in two different
types of flow situation. These are:
1. The creeping motion of a sphere moving through an expanse of
liquid.
2. The combined steady and oscillatory flow of a liquid through a
straight tube of circular cross section.
The first part of the work is devoted to the
prediction of the drag correction factor for a sphere falling slowly
through a bounded inelastic power law fluid. The analysis is carried
out for the case when the outer spherical boundary has a finite or
infinite radius. A perturbation technique is used to produce the
resulting equations for a slightly power law fluid which are solved
using the finite element method. An asymptotic expansion is used to
provide an analytical far field solution for the infinite outer
sphere case.
The second part considers the combined steady and
oscillatory flow of an inelastic power law liquid in a tube. The
analysis is carried. out for the case when both the steady flow rate
and the oscillatory flow rate are known. An expression for the
pressure gradient reduction in the tube is then derived. The
resulting partial differential equation is solved by finite
difference techniques. An analytical solution for the pressure
gradient is also obtained using a perturbation analysis for the case
when the fluid inertial effects are small.