Flow Filling a Curved Pipe

Abstract

A small scale experiment was designed to study the propagation of the front of a viscous fluid filling a curved pipe. Several Newtonian fluids with different viscosities and a non-Newtonian fluid have been used. The experiments show that there exists a minimum speed for completely filling the pipe, which depends on the parameters of the experiment (diameter d and radius of curvature R of the pipe, kinematic viscosity ν of the fluid). Appropriate dimensionless numbers are introduced to characterize the flow and optimal filling conditions.