An experimental study of pressure drop in helical pipes

Pressure drops of fully-developed incompressible laminar newtonian flows in helical pipes of constant circular cross-section having a finite pitch are experimentally investigated. For the case of loosely coiled pipes of 0 < η/λ < 41.22, f Re (f is the Fanning friction factor and Re is the Reynolds number) is found to be proportional to the square root of the flow Dean number, Dn = Re λ½. Here λ and η are the normalized curvature ratio and torsion which incorporate both the coil radius and its pitch. In all cases studied, the experimental results for f Re are in excellent agreement with the theoretical prediction of Liu & Masliyah.

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