ASHRAE Journal - September 2023 - 71
COLUMN
REFRIGERATION APPLICATIONS
Andy Pearson
Reynolds: The Calm
and The Storm
BY ANDY PEARSON, PH.D., C.ENG., FELLOW ASHRAE
In a talk I gave a few years ago about secondary refrigerants, I spoke about five men
whose work in fluid mechanics had transformed our ability to calculate fluid flow
and heat transfer. They were Osborne Reynolds, Ludwig Prandtl, Wilhelm Nusselt,
Thomas Stanton and Allan Colburn. If you have only come across one of them, then I
am fairly sure it would be Professor Reynolds.
Reynolds was born in 1842 in Belfast, Ireland,
but grew up in the southeast of England on the
border of Essex and Suffolk. His father, also
named Osborne, was a school
headmaster and clergyman who had
a love of mathematics and all things
mechanical. Young Osborne inherited
this enthusiasm and, as a teenager
before going to university, he worked
for two years as an apprentice in a
rather unusual shipyard. The Watling
Works in Stony Stratford, just north
of Milton Keynes, was established
by Edward Hayes around 1850 to
manufacture lightweight but powerful
steam engines for agricultural
machinery. The Hayes engine was
soon adapted for marine applications,
initially to power canal boats, and then as that
business grew, the firm diversified into building
complete ships for river and coastal navigation,
despite the fact that the yard was over seventy miles
from the coast and the finished vessels had to be
transported by road to a suitable launching point.
One of Edward Hayes' innovations was to introduce
a heat exchanger in the canal boats as a " surface
Burt found turbulence wherever he went.
condenser " with water flow induced by the pressure
difference between the canal water at the side of the
boat and in the eddy currents at the stern. Osborne
Reynolds joined the firm just at the
time that Hayes was starting his boat
building enterprise, and the young
man noted that a true understanding
of the mechanical phenomena that
he was seeing required a deeper
understanding of mathematics, so after
his apprenticeship he went to Queens
College, Cambridge to take a degree
in mathematics. When he graduated
in 1867, he worked for a short time
in London as a civil engineering
consultant before his appointment
in 1868 to the newly founded chair
of Civil and Mechanical Engineering
at Owens College, Manchester (now part of the
University of Manchester) where he remained until
his retirement in 1905.
Reynolds' life's work in Manchester was in the
investigation and characterization of the ways in
which liquids and gases flow. He realized that the
distinction between laminar and turbulent flow was
related to the relationship between the inertial forces
S E PTEM B ER 2023 ashrae.org ASHRAE JOURNAL
71
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ASHRAE Journal - September 2023
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of ASHRAE Journal - September 2023
Table of contents
ASHRAE Journal - September 2023 - Intro
ASHRAE Journal - September 2023 - Cover1
ASHRAE Journal - September 2023 - Cover2
ASHRAE Journal - September 2023 - 1
ASHRAE Journal - September 2023 - Table of contents
ASHRAE Journal - September 2023 - 3
ASHRAE Journal - September 2023 - 4
ASHRAE Journal - September 2023 - 5
ASHRAE Journal - September 2023 - 6
ASHRAE Journal - September 2023 - 7
ASHRAE Journal - September 2023 - 8
ASHRAE Journal - September 2023 - 9
ASHRAE Journal - September 2023 - 10
ASHRAE Journal - September 2023 - 11
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ASHRAE Journal - September 2023 - 13
ASHRAE Journal - September 2023 - 14
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ASHRAE Journal - September 2023 - 61
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ASHRAE Journal - September 2023 - 71
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ASHRAE Journal - September 2023 - Cover3
ASHRAE Journal - September 2023 - Cover4
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