Developed LAminar Flow in Pipe using Computational Fluid Dynamics

Abstract

In the analysis of water distribution networks, the design parameters are the lengths, diameters, and the coefficients friction of a pipe. Although some of these parameters such as the pipe lengths and the pipe diameters would remain the same at different points but the coefficients friction would change during the life of network and therefore they can be treated as imprecise information. A computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model of fully-developed laminar flow in a pipe is derived and implemented. This well known problem is used to introduce the basic concepts of CFD including, the finite-volume mesh, the discrete nature of the numerical solution, and the dependence of the result on the mesh refinement. The Numerical results are presented for a sequence of finer meshes, and the dependency of the truncation error on mesh size is verified experimentally. The comparison test results validate the analysis.