Bolus Contaminant Dispersion in Oscillatory Tube Flow With Conductive Walls

Abstract

Dispersion of a bolus contaminant in a straight tube with oscillatory flows and conductive walls is solved by using a derivative-expansion method. Using asymptotic methods when small conductance exists, the axial dispersion, as measured by the time-averaged effective diffusivity, increases over the insulated case, as long as the dimensionless frequency (Womersley parameter), α, is smaller than a critical value. When α exceeds this value, axial dispersion is diminished by wall conductance. The functional dependence of this critical α on the system parameters is investigated. We examine the radial wall transport both for total mass and localized flux, which is found to be independent of velocity field, and compute the time-dependent total mass of wall transport and asymptotic Sherwood number for large times as a function of the wall conductance.