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Flow and losses in pipes and ttings Such a low velocity is seldom of interest in practice. A critical velocity 10 times as great would require a diameter 10 times smaller, that is, 2.5 mm. This, too, is a gure outside normal engineering practice. The velocity of water is generally far greater than the critical value and so the ow is normally fully turbulent. This is not to say that laminar ow of water may not be found in laboratory experiments or other small-scale work. Indeed, in the testing of small-scale models of hydraulic structures, the presence of laminar ow that does not correspond to the ow occurring in the full-size prototype may constitute a considerable difculty. Water, however, has a low viscosity. Oil having a kinematic viscosity of, say, 200 times that of water would, in a pipe of 25 mm diameter, have a critical velocity of 200 0.092 m s1 = 18.4 m s1 . This velocity is far in excess of any that one would expect in practice, so it would be necessary to treat the ow of such oil as laminar. Even in a pipe of 250 mm diameter, a mean velocity of 1.84 m s1 could be reached without the ow becoming turbulent. By similar considerations we may see that the wholly laminar ow of air or steam in a pipe does not often occur.

7.2.2

Head lost to friction

One of the most important items of information the engineer needs is the pressure difference, or difference of piezometric head, required to induce uid to ow at a certain steady rate through a pipe. About the middle of the nineteenth century, therefore, many experimenters devoted attention to this topic. Among them was the French engineer Henri Darcy (180358) who investigated the ow of water, under turbulent conditions, in long, unobstructed, straight pipes of uniform diameter. The fall of piezometric head in the direction of ow is caused by the dissipation of energy by uid friction. If the pipe is of uniform cross-section and roughness, and the ow is fully developed, that is if it is sufciently far from the inlet of the pipe for conditions to have become settled, the piezometric head falls uniformly. Darcys results suggest the formula (now commonly named after him): hf = 4f l u2 p = g d 2g (7.1)

In eqn 7.1, hf represents the head lost to friction, corresponding (in steady ow) to the drop p of piezometric pressure over length l of the pipe, represents the density of the uid, u the mean velocity (i.e. discharge divided by cross-sectional area), f is a coefcient, g the gravitational acceleration and d the pipe diameter. Friction factor The coefcient f in eqn 7.1 is usually known as the friction factor. Comparison of the dimensional formulae of the two sides of eqn 7.1 shows that f is simply a numeric without units. Observations show that its value depends on the Reynolds number of the ow and on the roughness of the pipe surface. In