Two formulas are proposed for explicitly evaluating drag coefficient and settling velocity of spherical particles, respectively, in the entire subcritical region. Comparisons with fourteen previously-developed formulas show that the present study gives the best representation of a complete set of historical data reported in the literature for Reynolds numbers up to 2×10.

We study here the motion of a spherical gas bubble in a solid body rotating flow of clean silicon oil, to avoid contamination of interface. From the measurement of its equilibrium position, lift and drag forces are determined. Five different silicon oils have been used, providing five different viscosities and Morton numbers. For spherical bubbles the drag coefficient is at first order the same...

Air bubbles are used in chemical, biochemical, environmental, and food process for improving the heat and mass transfer. Due to the dominance of non-Newtonian liquids used in various process industries, an understanding of bubble rise in rheologically complex liquids has grown to be important. An experimental study of the bubble rise velocity and drag co-efficient at high Reynolds number in non...

Efficient swimming at low Reynolds numbers is a major concern of microbots. To compare the efficiencies of different swimmers we introduce the notion of "a swimming drag coefficient" which allows for the ranking of swimmers. We find the optimal swimmer within a certain class of two-dimensional swimmers using conformal mapping techniques.

An experimental study is conducted on flow past a circular cylinder fitted with some tripping wires on its surface. The work investigates the dependency of the critical wire locations on the wire size and Reynolds numbers, and examines the wake and vortex shedding characteristics in an effort to advance the understanding of the critical wire effects beyond the existing literature. The primary a...

Flow over micro-scale airfoils is investigated in order to understand the aerodynamic issues related to micro air vehicle design and performance. Studies have shown that such low Reynolds number flow exhibits rarefied phenomena and a flat plate having a thickness ratio of 5% has better aerodynamic performance than conventional streamlined airfoils. This paper simulates gas flows over a 5% flat ...

In this paper we report on (two-component) LDV experiments in a fully developed turbulent pipe flow with a drag-reducing polymer (partially hydrolyzed polyacrylamide) dissolved in water. The Reynolds number based on the mean velocity, the pipe diameter and the local viscosity at the wall is approximately 10000. We have used polymer solutions with three different concentrations which have been c...

The problem of determining the low Reynolds number lift and drag on a flat plate in Oseen flow is treated by the application of a variational principle due to Levine and Schwinger. This approach circumvents the difficulty which has limited previous results to drastically low values of the Reynolds number. In particular, an asymptotic form for the drag coefficient is derived, and found to be sui...