Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 April 2006
The flows considered here are those where a container or confined region is being filled by a substantial flow of liquid. The case of especial interest is where the incoming flow fills a large part of the cross-section of the container, for example where a nearly full flowing conduit has one end suddenly closed and hence fills rapidly, or where a water wave propagates close to the under surface of a horizontal structure and then rapidly fills the available space. These flows are taken to be so rapid that gravity is unimportant and yet not so violent that compressibility effects become significant. Important features, such as the greatly enhanced pressures and a thin high-velocity return jet are evaluated. The calculated pressures are very significantly greater than those associated with the incoming flow velocity and can be especially large when there is little clearance between the flow and the container boundary. One of many possible applications is in the extension of cracks and openings in coastal cliffs and structures. The flows could also be relevant to estimating the forces on the underside of some marine structures. A simple two-dimensional irrotational free-surface solution is found for the flow, which is steady in a suitably moving frame of reference.
Reversing the direction of one of these filling flows gives the case of a narrow high-speed jet which may be used to flush liquid out of cavities and containers. The optimum size of jet is calculated.
To send this article to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you used this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your Dropbox account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you used this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your Google Drive account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.