Local resistance of fluid flow across sudden contraction in small channels

Abstract

The pressure drop caused by flow area contraction in microchannels has been experimentally studied in this paper using the tiny gap pressure measurement method. The working fluid was deionized water at room temperature at near-atmospheric pressure. Three test sections with area ratios of 0.284 and 0.274 and at different tube diameter sizes were used. The experimental results show that the abrupt contraction coefficient K_c decreases with the Reynolds number increasing, and it is much higher than that of conventional tubes in laminar flow. The widely-applied correlation K_c=0.5(1−σ)^0.75 could not predict the contraction coefficient of turbulent flow in the micro tubes. The K_c decreases as the tube diameter increases. The transition from laminar to turbulent flow is not obvious when the diameter of the small tube is 0.32mm.

Keywords

microchannels / pressure drop / abrupt contraction / loss coefficients