Effective Flow of Micropolar Fluid through a Thin or Long Pipe.pdfVIP

Hindawi Publishing Corporation Mathematical Problems in Engineering Volume 2011, Article ID 127070, 18 pages doi:10.1155/2011/127070 Research Article Effective Flow of Micropolar Fluid through a Thin or Long Pipe Igor Pazanin ˇ Department of Mathematics, Faculty of Science, University of Zagreb, Bijenicka 30, 10000 Zagreb, Croatia ˇ Correspondence should be addressed to Igor Pazanin, pazanin@math.hr ˇ Received 30 October 2010; Accepted 9 February 2011 Academic Editor: Saad A. Ragab Copyright q 2011 Igor Pazanin. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative ˇ Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The aim of this paper is to present the result about asymptotic approximation of the micropolar fluid flow through a thin or long straight pipe with variable cross section. We assume that the flow is governed by the prescribed pressure drop between pipe’s ends. Such model has relevance to some important industrial and engineering applications. The asymptotic behavior of the flow is investigated via rigorous asymptotic analysis with respect to the small parameter, being the ratio between pipe’s thickness and its length. In the case of circular pipe, we obtain the explicit formulae for the approximation showing explicitly the effects of microstructure on the flow. We prove the corresponding error estimate justifying the obtained asymptotic model. 1. Introduction The Navier-Stokes model of classical hydrodynamics has a drastic limitation: it does not take