It is very important to make clear static and dynamic characteristics on the deformation of collapsible tubes caused by inner flow and the difference between the internal and external pressures in order to understand the physiological function of a human body, because there exist many such kinds of tubes in the human body like vein, urethra and trachea which are very easy to be subjected to cross-sectional and longitudinal deformations. In this paper, the tube deformation characteristics for a circular collapsible rubber tube under a constant external pressure and some different flow rates are investigated in conjunction with flow characteristics. The deformed cross-section was visualized by applying a laser light sheet onto the arbitrary observing section vertical to the tube axis, while the resulting image was photographed at an oblique angle to the tube axis. The image processing including the geometrical optical modification was used for the reconstruction of the real geometry. The deformation results are three-dimensional geometry and are closely related to flow characteristics.
A liquid crystal technique of visualization has been known to be suitable for qualitative, simultaneous observations of temperature and velocity fields in fluid. Here we tried to make it useful also for quantitative measurements of the temperature field by the use of a multiple liquid crystal technique (MLCT) in which we mix the test water with several types of liquid crystals with different narrow thermally active ranges. In order to see how useful MLCT is, we applied it to the rotating fluid annulus experiments and found that MLCT could afford enough number of isothermal lines in the fluid for proving experimentally the well-known thermal wind equation.