Author(s)

G. Petkovsek & B. Kompare

Abstract

Oscillatory flow in a U-shaped tube is a very convenient way to study unsteady pipe flow, since it covers a wide range of both velocities and accelerations. For laminar flow, analytical solutions are known, but also quasi-steady or empirical models can be applied. A brief overview of these models is given in the first part. On the other hand, we used a different approach towards modelling unsteady pipe flow Namely, instead of deriving equation from basic principles of dynamics, we tried to generate the differential equation describing the flow in a U-tube directly from the measured data using one of the automatic machine learning methods. For this purpose, a set of experiments was designed and performed. Different water column lengths were tested in a pipe of diameter

Keywords