Simple Methods for Flow Field Computation in Perforated Tubes

Incompressible flow in perforated tubes has many industrial applications including jet engine cooling.Numerical solution methods for multi-dimensional flow models are often prohibitively expensive.Therefore, engineers are interested in simple and rapid computational methods that are applicable in determining velocity and pressure fields in perforated tubes.To respond to this demand, the present paper introduces a number of such methods.Furthermore, using the aforementioned simple methods, the effects of the distribution and diameters of circular holes in a perforated tube with a closed end on the flow field are thoroughly investigated.It is shown that using a onedimensional ideal flow model, analytical solution is possible when the holes have equal diameters and are uniformly distributed (Case 1).A semi-analytical procedure is presented for the ideal flow model when the holes are non-uniformly distributed and/or have various diameters (Case 2).To take the effects of fluid viscosity into consideration, viscous flow in a perforated tube is solved using a numerical solution approach (Case 3).A criterion is provided regarding the applicability of the ideal flow model.Comparison with experimentally-obtained pressure field in a perforated tube shows that the maximum error of ideal flow model, when applicable, is less than 20%.The numerical viscous flow solution is also validated and excellent match with the reference data is observed.