Laminar Flow in Microchannels With Noncircular Cross Section

Abstract

Analytical solutions are presented for laminar fully developed flow in micro-/minichannels of hyperelliptical and regular polygonal cross sections in the form of compact relationships. The considered geometries cover a wide range of common simply connected shapes including circle, ellipse, rectangle, rectangle-with-round-corners, rhombus, star-shape, equilateral triangle, square, pentagon, and hexagon. A point matching technique is used to calculate closed form solutions for the velocity distributions in the above-mentioned channel cross sections. The developed relationships for the velocity distribution and pressure drop are successfully compared with existing analytical solutions and experimental data collected from various sources for a variety of geometries, including polygonal, rectangular, circular, elliptical, and rhombic cross sections. The present compact solutions provide a convenient and power tool for performing hydrodynamic analyses in a variety of fundamental and engineering applications such as in microfluidics, transport phenomena, and porous media.