Couette Flow - Finite-width Model

Finite-width Model

Taylor's solution accounts for the curvature inherent in the cylindrical devices typically used to create Couette flows, but not the finite nature of the width. A complementary idealization accounts for finiteness, but not curvature. In the figure above, we might think of the "boundary plate" and the "moving plate" as the edges of two cylinders having large radii, say and, respectively, where is only slightly greater than . In this case, curvature can be neglected locally. The physicist/mathematician Ratip Berker reported a mathematical solution for this configuration in terms of a trigonometric expansion