2. Steady Internal Incompressible Viscous Flow 289
Reynolds shear can be expressed in terms of velocity gradient, similar to the New-
ton law of viscosity. Boussinesq made this analogy by introducing the concept of
eddy viscosity to obtain:
dy
Vd
VV
x
yx
ε
−=
''
where
ε
is known as eddy diffusivity for momentum. The quantity
ρε
is usually
interpreted as an eddy viscosity analogous to
µ
, the molecular viscosity, but
whereas the
µ
is a fluid property,
ρε
is a parameter of fluid motion. We study the
shear stresses in internal flow in the next section.
2. Steady Internal Incompressible Viscous Flow
The topic of internal flow covers the vast field of fluid flow in pipelines, fittings,
valves, pumps, and turbines.
Velocity Distribution
In Section 1 we noted that unlike laminar flow, in turbulent flow no simple rela-
tion exists between the shear stress and the mean velocity field. Hence, there is no
fundamental theory to determine the velocity distribution on a purely theoretical
basis. As a result, semi-empirical relations are used to determine the velocity field
in turbulent flow. In this section, both laminar and turbulent flows inside pipes are
studied and relevant correlations are presented.
Shown in Figure IIIb.2.1 are the boundary layers for flow inside a pipe. For the
fully developed flow, flow can either be laminar or turbulent.
Parabolic
velocity
profile
V
max
V
τ
τ
w
τ
w
Laminar flow
Turbulent flow
V
max
V
τ
τ
w
τ
w
Figure IIIb.2.1. Shear stress and laminar and turbulent boundary layers in pipes
Our goal is to derive the profile for shear stress as well as the velocity profile
for both laminar and turbulent flow regimes. In these derivations, we will see that
the shear stress has a linear profile regardless of the flow regime. We will also see
that the laminar flow has a parabolic velocity profile where the maximum velocity
is much larger than the average velocity. In turbulent flow, the velocity profile is
much flatter than the laminar velocity profile. Thus, the maximum velocity is just
slightly larger than the average velocity. In the fully developed region, V
r
= 0 and
so is ∂V
x
/∂x = 0. In both flow regimes, the average velocity is obtained from: