- #1
kibestar
- 16
- 2
I am struggling to fully grasp the concept of flow work for a non-deformabable control volume.
Nearly every source puts it in this way: flow work is the work required to push fluid into and out of the control volume and as such is defined as Pv on a unit mass basis. But how can this work be accomplished if the control volume's boundary is fixed in space and has no width? As I see it, fluid that is outside the control volume cannot exert a force due to pressure on fluid inside the control volume through a finite distance, since any differential displacement would put the upstream parcel of fluid inside the control volume. If flow work then refers to work done on fluid that hasn't yet crossed the boundary, why wouldn't this energy transfer be accounted for by the internal energy?
How to reconcile this? Where am I wrong?
Nearly every source puts it in this way: flow work is the work required to push fluid into and out of the control volume and as such is defined as Pv on a unit mass basis. But how can this work be accomplished if the control volume's boundary is fixed in space and has no width? As I see it, fluid that is outside the control volume cannot exert a force due to pressure on fluid inside the control volume through a finite distance, since any differential displacement would put the upstream parcel of fluid inside the control volume. If flow work then refers to work done on fluid that hasn't yet crossed the boundary, why wouldn't this energy transfer be accounted for by the internal energy?
How to reconcile this? Where am I wrong?