Bernoulli correction to viscous losses:: Radial flow between two parallel discs

For a massless fluid (rho=0), the steady flow along a duct is governed exclusively by viscous losses. In this paper, we show that the velocity profile obtained in this limit can be used to calculate the pressure drop up to the first order in rho. This method has been applied to the particular case of a duct, defined by two plane-parallel discs. For this case, the first-order approximation results in a simple analytical solution which has been favorably checked against numerical simulations. Finally, an experiment has been carried out with water flowing between the discs. The experimental results show good agreement with the approximate solution. (c) 2008 American Association of Physics Teachers.