Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 September 2005
The present work aims at studying mainly the wall shear stress ofa laminar steady flow of an incompressible Newtonian fluid whichis conveyed through a collapsed tube with a straight centreline.This tube is composed of a tapered segment, a contact segmentwhere the opposite walls touch and a reopening segment. The tubegeometry and steady flow characteristics are obtained frommeasurements in a collapsed tube. The Navier-Stokesequations associated with the classical boundary conditions aresolved using the finite element method. The tridimensional flowresults from the tube configuration. In particular, the flowconsists of two side-jets due to two tear-drop shaped outerpassages in the downstream contact segment associated withreversed flow. In order to compute both the stream-wise andcross-wise components of the shear stress on the wall, a localbasis is defined in each wall node. Downstream of the contactsegment, flow is separated in two jets which are studied thoughthe help of the velocity field and the wall shear stress.