Integral Method for Flow Between Corotating Disks

Abstract

An integral method is developed for the three-dimensional, nonboundary-layer flow which occurs for laminar, radially inward through-flow of an incompressible Newtonian fluid between parallel corotating disks. The method is a forward-stepping procedure which forces satisfaction of integrals of the governing differential equations, plus boundary conditions, plus the governing differential equations at every radius. The velocity components are represented by polynomials of order N; the method is extendable with extraordinary ease to any value of N. It is reported that, with N = 8, the results agree very closely with results earlier obtained by a conventional finite-difference method and which agree with experiment. It is pointed out that the method presented is extremely conservative of computational time and might be adapted to many other problems.