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It is obvious that there is a big difference between blowing & sucking fluid into/from relatively large volume using a small opening. Blowed fluid keeps a coherent stream, on the other hand, sucking results in gathering fluid from all directions.

It is intuitively admissible but can anyone show this phenomenon in mathematical way? No one seems to have done this, and everyone looks satisfied with explanations like above somehow.

How do Navier–Stokes equations contain this result? Or what happens one by one during CFD calculation process?

(A rough simulation by OpenFoam told me that two vortices immediately are shaped on each side of the stream head when it enters into the large space. Would these vortices prevent the stream spreading out?)

enter image description here

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Self answer

Since I started to think about this, I instantly realize it is easy to explain in Newtonian way, I wanted to understand it in fluid dynamical way though.

Let us regard small cells of fluid as solid materials like metal balls. If one throws balls into a ball pool from a small hole, the stream of balls should be shaped because pushed ball should push the ball ahead repeatedly, and there is no force by which these balls spread out. On the other hand, if one picks one ball at the hole out of the pool, the stream should not be shaped because a ball can not pull other balls, and if balls are moving little randomly, the empty hole will be filled by them slowly and this might be replaced by pressure of fluid.

It seems to make sense, but I could not sure how this push/pull difference is represented in the Navier-Stokes equations and the Continuity equation.

To make the problem easy, I construct a small model which has 4 openings like this. A brief model

Putting a fan at the bottom and starting to inhale air, there are two possibilities:

  1. Air spreads out all directions
  2. A straight flow is shaped

two choice for inhaling

Both of them satisfies the continuity equation. Therefore we should check only whether these situations are stable and satify the Navier-Stokes equations or not.

The wrong one is former one of course, but why? Now we estimate the situation 1 is stable, and will reach a conflict. considering incompressible 2D-Navier-Stokes equations: $$ \frac{\partial u}{\partial t} + u_{x}\frac{\partial u}{\partial x} + u_{y}\frac{\partial u}{\partial y} = -\frac{1}{\rho}\nabla p $$ We estimate it stable so don't need the first term: $$ u_{x}\frac{\partial u}{\partial x} + u_{y}\frac{\partial u}{\partial y} = -\frac{1}{\rho}\nabla p $$ we can see the convective term and pressure field form directly each other. Roughly speaking, air is accelerate/decelerate according to pressure gradient like this (red is higher):

a pressure distribution

But this has a problem. Because the outside pressure of these opening are same, there must be pressure gradient at top opening:

p distribution 2

therefore, it can't be stable. The high pressure inside the pipe releases by accelerating air due to the pressure gradient at the top, then eventually it reaches the situation 2.

When it comes to extracting, also two options are here.

  1. Air gathers from all directions
  2. A straight flow is shaped

The wrong one is later this time. in the situation 2, the air at top opening should be accelerated without the fan, and only available resource is pressure gradient. Therefore, there must be pressure gradient outside around the top:

p dist3

As shown in the figure, this condition has to make pressure gradient at side as well which excites the flow from outside to inside, and it goes to situation 1.

These are almost not mathematical analysis at all. Maybe wrong.

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