Investigations of Tripping Effect on the Friction Factor in Turbulent Pipe Flows

Tripping devices are usually installed at the entrance of laboratory-scale pipe test sections to obtain a fully developed turbulent flow sooner. The tripping of laminar flow to induce turbulence can be carried out in different ways, such as using cylindrical wires, sand papers, well-organized tape elements, fences, etc. Claims of tripping effects have been made since the classical experiments of Nikuradse (1932, Gesetzmässigkeit der turbulenten Strömung in glatten Rohren, Forschungsheft 356, Ausgabe B, Vol. 3, VDI-Verlag, Berlin), which covered a significant range of Reynolds numbers. Nikuradse’s data have become the metric by which theories are established and have also been the subject of intense scrutiny. Several subsequent experiments reported friction factors as much as 5% lower than those measured by Nikuradse, and the authors of those reports attributed the difference to tripping effects, e.g., work of Durst et al. (2003, “Investigation of the Mean-Flow Scaling and Tripping Effect on Fully Developed Turbulent Pipe Flow,” J. Hydrodynam., 15(1), pp. 14–22). In the present study, measurements with and without ring tripping devices of different blocking areas of 10%, 20%, 30%, and 40% have been carried out to determine the effect of entrance condition on the developing flow field in pipes. Along with pressure drop measurements to compute the skin friction, both the Pitot tube and hot-wire anemometry measurements have been used to accurately determine the mean velocity profile over the working test section at different Reynolds numbers based on the mean velocity and pipe diameter in the range of $1.0×105–4.5×105$⁠. The results we obtained suggest that the tripping technique has an insignificant effect on the wall friction factor, in agreement with Nikuradse’s original data.