Experimental study of fluid flow in the entrance of a sinusoidal channel

An experimental flow visualization study of the entrance section of channels formed with sinusoidal plates was made. The experiments were conducted in a water tunnel and a laser illuminated particle tracking was used as the technique of flow visualization. The geometric parameters of the plates were maintained constant while the distance between plates, phase angle, and the Reynolds number were varied during the experiments. The flow regimes that were found in the experiments are steady, unsteady and significantly-mixed flows. Instabilities of the flow first appear near the exit of the channel, and move closer to the inlet waves as the Reynolds number grows, but in the first wave from inlet the flow is always steady. The results show that, for all other parameters fixed, the Reynolds number at which unsteady flow first appears grows with the distance between plates. The phase angle that best promotes unsteady flow depends on the average distance between plates: for certain average distance between plates, there is a phase angle that best disturbs the flow. For the set of parameters used in this experiment, a channel with eight waves is sufficiently long and the flow features presented in the first eight waves of a longer channel will be similar to what was observed here.