Flow Past Immersed Bodies

At very high Reynolds numbers the viscous forces are quite small compared to the inertia forces and the viscosity can be assumed as zero. These equations are useful in calculating pressure distribution at the outer edge of the thin boundary layer in flow past immersed bodies. Away from the surface outside the boundary layer this assumption of an ideal fluid is often valid. 

The flow of fluids outside immersed bodies appears in many chemical engineering applications and other processing applications. These occur, for example, in flow past spheres in settling, flow through packed beds in drying and filtration, flow past tubes in heat exchangers, and so on. It is useful to be able to predict the frictional losses and/or the force on the submerged objects in these various applications. 

The overall rate of heat transfer, from bodies of any shape past which fluid streams in Stokes flow, has the remarkable property of being invariant to reversal of the direction of the streaming flow at infinity (B26b) that is, for a particle of uniform surface temperature immersed in a fluid of different uniform temperature at infinity, the average Nusselt number is the same for... 

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