Stokes’ and Lamb's viscous drag laws

Abstract

Since Galileo used his pulse to measure the time period of a swinging chandelier in the 17th century, pendulums have fascinated scientists. It was not until Stokes' (1851 Camb. Phil. Soc. 9 8–106) (whose interest was spurred by the pendulur time pieces of the mid 19th century) treatise on viscous flow that a theoretical framework for the drag on a sphere at low Reynolds number was laid down. Stokes' famous drag law has been used to determine two fundamental physical constants—the charge on an electron and Avogadro's constant—and has been used in theories which have won three Nobel prizes. Considering its illustrious history it is then not surprising that the flow past a sphere and its two-dimensional analog, the flow past a cylinder, form the starting point of teaching flow past a rigid body in undergraduate level fluid mechanics courses. Usually starting with the two-dimensional potential flow past a cylinder, students progress to the three-dimensional potential flow past a sphere. However, when the viscous flow past rigid bodies is taught, the three-dimensional example of a sphere is first introduced, and followed by (but not often), the two-dimensional viscous flow past a cylinder. The reason why viscous flow past a cylinder is generally not taught is because it is usually explained from an asymptotic analysis perspective. In fact, this added mathematical complexity is why the drag on a cylinder was only solved in 1911, 60 years after the drag on a sphere. In this note, we show that the viscous flow past a cylinder can be explained without the need to introduce any asymptotic analysis while still capturing all the physical insight of this classic fluid mechanics problem.