Flow at very small values of Reynolds numbers

Abstract

Viscous flow, having very complicated mathematical solutions, and limited technological uses has never been dealt with deeply, as one can see from the hydrodynamic, fluidmechanics and aerodynamic textbooks that one meets in an engineering section of a library. Therefore it was the aim of this project to investigate the three dimensional motion of a fluid round a volume of revolution, namely the drag coefficients of various bodies, such as spheres, cones of various vertex angles, cylinders with various length to diameter ratios and any other volumes of revolutions that could be machined accurately on a workshop lathe. From the work that was performed, the most important conclusions were: i) Stokes' solution for the drag on a sphere moving at Reynolds numbers very much smaller than unity is correct. ii) All bodies moving with constant velocity and under highly viscous conditions, that is at Reynolds numbers less than about 0.1, obeyed the same law, where the only variant depending on the body is a constant, which varies according to the shape of the body [...].