Steady liquid flow in a variable-area rectangular duct rotating rapidly about an axis perpendicular to its centre-line is treated. This problem is significant because the idea of driving a liquid through a rotating system has been largely overlooked by rotating-fluid dynamicists and because it closely resembles the flow inside the impellers of centrifugal pumps and hydraulic turbines. For a prototype formed by joining a semi-infinite constant-area duct and a semi-infinite duct with straight diverging walls, the flow in the diverging duct is carried entirely by large, O(E1/3) velocities in a boundary layer of thickness O(E1/3) adjacent to one of the (side) walls parallel to the axis of rotation, where E is the (small) Ekman number. With a vertical axis of rotation this high-velocity boundary layer is adjacent to the side wall on the right when facing in the flow direction. For a diverging or converging duct placed between two semi-infinite constant-area ducts, large, O(E1/3) velocities occur in side-wall boundary layers on both sides of the variable-area duct and on the left and right sides of the upstream and downstream constant-area ducts respectively. The existence of high-velocity side layers in rapidly rotating rectangular ducts should be relatively easy to prove experimentally and actual measurements of their velocity profiles would provide a good test of the present theory.

The incompressible starting flow past a downstream-facing right-angled step was investigated at Reynolds numbers R (based on step height) less than 500 by means of flow-visualization techniques. The distance between the step and the point of reattachment on the downstream wall was found to increase linearly with time at intermediate stages of the flow development. The recirculation region formed behind the step was composed of three vortex domains at earlier stages of its development when R [gap ] 140. It was observed for R [gap ] 200 that once the starting vortices had been shed downstream a steady recirculation region was established. The evolution of filaments of tracer in the flow down the step was found to vary considerably with R. The filaments were observed to develop faster in the flow down the step than in that past a symmetric model without a downstream wall when R [gap ] 140.

The linear stability of a slowly varying flow, the flow in a diverging straight-walled channel, is studied using a modification of the ‘WKB’ or ‘ray’ method. It is shown that ‘quasi-parallel’ theory, the usual method for handling such flows, gives the formally correct lowest-order growth rate; however, this growth rate can be substantially in error if its magnitude is comparable to that of the rate of change of the basic state. The method used clearly demonstrates the dependence of the growth rate, wavenumber, neutral curves, etc., on the cross-stream variable and on the flow quantity under consideration. When applied to the divergent channel, the method yields a much wider ‘unstable’ region and a much lower ‘critical’ Reynolds number (depending on the flow quantity used) than those predicted by quasi-parallel theory. The determination of the downstream development of waves of constant frequency shows that waves of all frequencies eventually decay.

Measurements are presented of the mean and fluctuating pressure field acting on a two-dimensional square cylinder in uniform and turbulent flows. The addition of turbulence to the flow is shown to raise the base pressure and reduce the drag of the body. It is suggested that this is attributable to the manner in which the increased turbulence intensity thickens the shear layers, which causes them to be deflected by the downstream corners of the body and results in the downstream movement of the vortex formation region. The strength of the vortex shedding is shown to be reduced as the intensity of the incident turbulence is increased.

Conditionally sampled hot-wire measurements were taken in a pipe at low Reynolds numbers (2700 > Re > 2000) corresponding to the onset of turbulence as a result of a large perturbation in the flow. This type of transition gives rise to a turbulent puff which maintains itself indefinitely at around Re = 2200. The structure of puffs was investigated in some detail and was found to be very different from the structure of fully developed turbulent pipe flow. Nevertheless, it is independent of the character of the disturbance which created it. The purpose of the study was to gain some insight into the mechanism of transition in a pipe.

The motion of a slender axisymmetric rod-like particle is investigated theoretically for translation through a quiescent second-order fluid and for rotation in a simple shear flow of the same material. The analysis consists of an asymptotic expansion about the limit of rheologically slow flow, coupled with an application of a generalized form of the reciprocal theorem of Lorentz to calculate the force and torque on the particle. It is shown that an arbitrarily oriented particle with fore-aft symmetry translates, to a first approximation, at the same rate as in an equivalent Newtonian fluid, but that the motion of particles with no fore-aft symmetry may be modified at the same level of approximation. In addition, it is found that freely translating particles with fore-aft symmetry exhibit a single stable orientation with the axis of revolution vertical. In simple shear flow at small and moderate shear rates, the non-Newtonian nature of the suspending fluid causes a drift through Jeffery orbits to the equilibrium orbit C = 0 in which the particle rotates about its axis of revolution. At larger shear rates, the particle aligns itself in the direction of flow and ceases to rotate. Comparison with the available experimental data indicates that the measured rate of orbit drift may be used to determine the second normal stress difference parameter of the second-order fluid model. Finally, in an appendix, some preliminary observations are reported of the motion of slender rod-like particles falling through a quiescent viscoelastic fluid.

This paper describes the development of a new technique for removing surface-active contaminants from water so that it may be used for surface-clean experiments in fluid mechanics. The removal of contamination from concentrated aqueous solutions of non-surface-active materials is also possible, allowing considerable variation of density and viscosity in these experiments. Instead of using the conventional distillation processes necessary for most work involving surface chemical phenomena, surface-active substances are removed by adsorption onto a dense current of small nitrogen gas bubbles rising in a long vertical column of the water. The efficiency of the technique was found to increase to a great extent when common salt was dissolved in the water, up to concentrations around 40 g/l, and experiments are described which allow the identification of several physical processes which aid the operation of the method. The adequate performance of the cleaning technique in the removal both of an ionic surface-active material and also of Gentian Violet dye is demonstrated. The method should permit the design of surface-clean experiments using much larger volumes of water than are possible when the water has to be distilled using conventional surface chemical techniques. A simple apparatus for the measurement of surface tension is also described.

An experimental investigation of the fluid mechanics of the transpired turbulent boundary layer in zero and adverse pressure gradients was carried out on the Stanford Heat and Mass Transfer Apparatus. Profiles of (a) the mean velocity, (b) the intensities of the three components of the turbulent velocity fluctuations and (c) the Reynolds stress were obtained by hot-wire anemometry. The wall shear stress was measured by using an integrated form of the boundary-layer equation to ‘extrapolate’ the measured shear-stress profiles to the wall.

The two experimental adverse pressure gradients corresponded to free-stream velocity distributions of the type u∞ ∞ xm, where m = −0·15 and −0·20, x being the streamwise co-ordinate. Equilibrium boundary layers (i.e. flows with velocity defect profile similarity) were obtained when the transpiration velocity v0 was varied such that the blowing parameter B = pv0u∞/τ0 and the Clauser pressure-gradient parameter $\beta\equiv\delta_1\tau_0^{-1}\,dp/dx $ were held constant. (τ0 is the shear stress at the wall and δ1 is the displacement thickness.)

Tabular and graphical results are presented.

The problem of determining the slow viscous flow of an unbounded fluid past a single solid particle is formulated exactly as a system of linear integral equations of the first kind for a distribution of Stokeslets over the particle surface. The unknown density of Stokeslets is identical with the surface-stress force and can be obtained numerically by reducing the integral equations to a system of linear algebraic equations. This appears to be an efficient way of determining solutions for several external flows past a particle, since it requires that the matrix of the algebraic system be inverted only once for a given particle.

The technique was tested successfully against the analytic solutions for spheroids in uniform and simple shear flows, and was then applied to two problems involving the motion of finite circular cylinders: (i) a cylinder translating parallel to its axis, for which the local stress force distribution and the drag were determined; and (ii) the equivalent axis ratio of a freely suspended cylinder, which was calculated by determining the couple on a stationary cylinder placed symmetrically in two different simple shear flows. The numerical results were found to be consistent with the asymptotic analysis of Cox (1970, 1971) and in excellent agreement with the experiments of Anczurowski & Mason (1968), but not with those of Harris & Pittman (1975).

The linearized theory of free-surface gravity flow past submerged or floating bodies is based on a perturbation expansion of the velocity potential in the slenderness parameter e with the Froude number F kept fixed. It is shown that, although the free-wave amplitude and the associated wave resistance tend to zero as F → 0, the linearized solution is not uniform in this limit: the ratio between the second- and first-order terms becomes unbounded as F → 0 with ε fixed. This non-uniformity (called ‘the second Froude number paradox’ in previous work) is related to the nonlinearity of the free-surface condition. Criteria for uniformity of the thin-body expansion, combining ε and F, are derived for two-dimensional flows. These criteria depend on the shape of the leading (and trailing) edge: as the shape becomes finer the linearized solution becomes valid for smaller F.

Uniform first-order approximations for two-dimensional flow past submerged bodies are derived with the aid of the method of co-ordinate straining. The straining leads to an apparent displacement of the most singular points of the body contour (the leading and trailing edges for a smooth shape) and, therefore, to an apparent change in the effective Froude number.