THE NATURE OF FLUIDS PRESSURE VISCOSITY DIFFUSION VISCOSITY AS A DIFFUSION COEFFICIENTPART I FLUID DYNAMICS 1CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION THE NATURE OF FLUIDS 1 Fluids are substances that deform continuously and permanently when they are subjected to forces that vary spatially in magnitude or direction. The nature of the relationship between the deforming forces and the geometry of deformation varies from fluid to fluid; you will see in this chapter that the relationship is a simple linear one for air and water. Fluids can be classified as either liquids, which are relatively dense and maintain a definite volume, and gases, which are less dense and expand to fill their container. Fluids, both liquids and gases, are distinguished from solids by their inability to withstand deforming forces: in contrast to solids, they continue to deform for as long as the deforming forces are applied. This distinction is actually not as neat as I have made it out to be, but we would become sidetracked into the field of rheology for elaboration. 2 Liquids and gases differ greatly in their structure on the atomic scale: liquids consist of closely packed molecules that exert strong forces on their neighbors as they weave around one another, sometimes forming fleeting and very small bonded aggregates, whereas gases, unless they are very compressed, consist of atoms or molecules that are almost always far apart from one another as they zip around along their free paths of motion, colliding with the walls of their container and occasionally with one another. 3 How is it, then, that the macroscopic motions of liquids and gases need not be considered separately? The answer is that fluids can be treated as if they were 2—as if their constituent matter, which is actually distributed discontinuously as atoms and molecules, were smeared uniformly throughout space. The idea here is that the forces among the constituent particles, which vary enormously in space on the scale of the particles themselves, average out to look as though they vary smoothly on scales much larger than the particles but very small relative to the macroscopic scales of problems in fluid dynamics—which themselves can be very small. To phrase this in a slightly different way: the structure of fluids is on such a fine scale that the actual intermolecular forces can just as well be treated as continuously and smoothly varying, from the standpoint of all problems in fluid dynamics on scales much larger than the molecules. The justification for this approach is that it works extremely well for fluid flows on scales that are much larger than the intermolecular spacing. So in these notes you never have to think again about the atoms and molecules of fluids! (Well, that’s not quite true, but almost.) 2PRESSURE 4 The concept of fluid pressure is one of the most fundamental in fluid dynamics. Generally in physics the term pressure is used for a force per unit area. But we need to be more specific about the significance of pressure in fluids. 5 Suppose that you immerse a solid test sphere in a container of fluid at rest, and suppose further that you have a little meter with which you can measure the normal force per unit area exerted by the fluid at some point on the surface of the sphere (Figure 1-1). That force per unit area is the pressure exerted by the fluid on the surface of the sphere. That probably seems like a simple enough concept. (Because the fluid is not moving relative to the sphere, the fluid exerts only a normal component of force, not a tangential component; we will start looking at the nature of the tangential force exerted by moving fluid on a solid surface in the following section.) But there is more to fluid pressure than just that. Figure 1-1. Normal force per unit area exerted by the fluid at a point on the surface of a tests sphere immersed in the fluid. 6 Now suppose that you make the solid sphere smaller and smaller. You can think of it as eventually becoming just a point. Then, associated with each line through that point there is a compressive force per unit area, directed inward from both directions along the line toward the point, with the same value as the force per unit area you measured on the surface of the test sphere (Figure 1-2). And the value of this compressive force per unit area is the same for every orientation of the line through the point. This is the essence of the concept of fluid pressure: it is a compressive force per unit area that acts equally in all directions at a point in the fluid, whether or not there is a solid surface at that point upon which the force acts. If there is no solid surface, you just have to think in terms of one part of the fluid continuum exerting a compressive force on the adjacent part of the fluid continuum. 3Figure 1-2. The compressive force per unit area associated with each line through a point in the fluid. 7 The concept of fluid pressure introduced above holds equally well for a moving fluid. Then you just have to imagine measuring the pressure at a point that is moving along with the fluid. It is convenient and natural to think of the pressure in a moving fluid as being made up of two parts, the static pressure and the dynamic pressure. The static pressure is the pressure that would be measured at the given point in the fluid if the fluid were not moving. The dynamic pressure is the difference between the total pressure—that is, the pressure you would actually measure at the given point in the moving fluid, with some appropriate instrument—and the static pressure. The dynamic pressure is the part of the pressure that is associated with the motion of the fluid. There will be much more to say about the relationship between fluid motion and dynamic pressure later in these notes; suffice it to say here that the dynamic pressure is zero in a stationary fluid, and also in a fluid that is in uniform motion, in the sense that there are no accelerations anywhere in the fluid (Figure 1-3). 8 It is not difficult to understand here, however, what determines the static pressure. In the case of fluid in a closed container, one part of the static pressure has to do just with the external compression imposed upon the walls of the container. When you blow up a balloon, the air pressure inside the balloon is greater than outside, because the distended walls of the balloon are trying to reshrink, and as a