Numerical study of compressible turbulent flow in microtubes

Micro- and conventional compressible, turbulent tube flows were solved numerically in this study. The numerical procedure solves the compressible, turbulent boundary-layer equations using an implicit finite-difference scheme. The parabolic character of the boundary-layer equations renders the numerical procedure a very efficient, accurate, and robust tool for studying compressible microtube flows. The Baldwin-Lomax two-layer turbulence model is adopted in the numerical procedure. The numerically calculated friction factors are compared with the Blasius correlation, the Fanno line flow prediction, and the experimental data. The comparison shows that the numerically calculated friction factors for conventional tube flows agree quite well with the Blasius correlation. The numerical friction factors for microtube flows are larger than the Blasius correlation due to the compressibility effects. They also are greater than the Fanno line flow prediction and the experimental data. This is because the Fanno line flow and the experimental data assume that the flow is adiabatic, but in reality, compressible, turbulent microtube flows are neither adiabatic nor isothermal, as demonstrated by the numerical results in this study.