Looking at the Moody chart I think to myself, the friction factor doesn't decrease much at all with Reynolds number after a certain point. I wonder if laminar flow is more efficient in a sense, and what sense would that be?
I understand that in laminar flow you have clear lines that the fluid doesn't cross, whereas that wouldn't be true in turbulent flow. We could imagine a pipe with a divider placed in the middle to keep the fluid from mixing in eddies, but that would just create more friction with the divider. There are thinkable cases, however, where you could introduce a divider that moves along with the fluid, in particular, the Taylor-Couette flow...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor%E2%80%93Couette_flow
This setup describes basically one cylinder rotating within another cylinder with a fluid in-between them.
Let's say that you kept the fluid the same, and the distance between the inner cylinder and outer cylinder the same. In that system, let's say you insert a divider at a radius in the middle of the annular area, and this divider was mostly buoyant in the fluid, so it's not experiencing friction on the edges, and it also is free to rotate with the fluid.
Would doing so actually reduce the frictional torque on the rotating inner cylinder? If you could introduce an infinite number of infinitely thin dividers is there a theoretical limit to how much you could reduce the retarding torque? Would that just make it laminar, or laminar-ish?
