Polar-plane flow in porous annular ducts with accelerated rotating walls. A region of stagnation inside the fluid

Abstract

Abstract The steady laminar flow of an incompressible Newtonian fluid in a porous annular duct with accelerated rotating walls is investigated. The flow is located in the polar plane and is driven by suction and injection at the walls. As required by conservation of mass with zero axial velocity, the fluid is injected into one of the cylinders, which becomes the upstream cylinder, and suctioned into the other, which represents the downstream cylinder. Only the case of the downstream cylinder at rest is examined. The duct gap ratio, the velocity ratio comparing the radial and azimuthal velocities, the Reynolds number, and the velocity coefficient that compares the fluid velocity at the upstream and downstream cylinders are the four parameters of the problem. The purpose of this research is to identify the prerequisites for the flow’s existence and determine how the aforementioned variables affect the flow velocity and pressure gradients at a fixed Reynolds number. The Navier–Stokes equations are replaced by the polar-plane vorticity equation, which is solved using the similarity-solutions method. The shooting technique, including the fourth-order Runge–Kutta algorithm, is used to produce numerical solutions. From the findings, physical understandings of the flow are derived. More specifically, we discover an unexpected interior zone where the fluid is perpetually at rest even while flow is present. The only solution found corresponds to the case of the inner cylinder upstream and rotating provided that the velocity ratio does not exceed the threshold of 0.1 with a velocity coefficient greater than 1.