Two-dimensional flow under gravity in a jet of viscous liquid

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the steady, symmetric, two-dimensional flow of a viscous, incompressible fluid issuing from an orifice and falling freely under gravity. A Reynolds number is defined and considered to be small. Due to the apparent intractability of the problem in the neighbourhood of the orifice, interest is confined to the flow region below the orifice, where the jet is bounded by two free streamlines. It is assumed that the influence of the orifice conditions will decay exponentially, and so the asymptotic solutions sought have no dependence upon the nature of the flow at the orifice. In the region just downstream of the orifice, it is expected that the inertia effects will be of secondary importance. Accordingly the Stokes solution is sought and a perturbation scheme is developed from it to take account of the inertia effects. It was found possible only to express the Stokes solution and its perturbations in the form of co-ordinate expansions. This perturbation scheme is found to be singular far downstream due to the increasing importance of the inertia effects. Far downstream the jet is expected to be very thin and the velocity and stress variations across it to be small. These assumptions are used as a basis in deriving an asymptotic expansion for small Reynolds numbers, which is valid far downstream. This expansion also has the appearance of being valid very far downstream, even for Reynolds numbers which are not necessarily small. The method of matched asymptotic expansions is used to link the asymptotic solutions in the two regions. An extension of the method deriving the expansion far downstream, to cover the case of an axially-symmetric jet, is given in an appendix.