It is obvious that the pressure gradient along the axial direction in a pipe flow keeps constant according to the Hagen-Poiseuille equation. However, recent experiments indicated that the distribution of the pressure seemed no longer linear for liquid flows in microtubes driven by high pressure （1-30MPa）. Based on H-P equation with slip boundary condition and Bridgman＇s relation of viscosity vs. static pressure, the nonlinear distribution of pressure along the axial direction is analyzed in this paper. The revised standard Poiseuille number with the effect of pressure-dependent viscosity taken into account agrees well with the experimental results. Therefore, the dependence of the viscosity on the pressure is one of the dominating factors under high driven pressure, and is represented by an important property coefficient α of the liquid.
Nanoqiter flowrate measurements in micro-tubes with displacement method were performed and the effect of capillarity force on the accuracy was investigated through lab experiments and theoretical analysis in this article. The experiments were conducted under the pressure drops ranging from 1 kPa to 10 kPa in a circular pipe with a diameter of 50 pm, to give the pressure-flowrate （P-Q） relation and verify the applicability of the classical Hagen-Poiseuille （HP） formula. The experimental results showed that there existed a discrepancy between the experimental data and the theoretical values predicted by the HP formula if the capillary effect was not considered, which exceeded obviously the limit of the system error. And hence a modified formula for the relation, taking the capillary effect into account, was presented through theoretical deduction, and after the HP formula had been modified the error was proved to be less than 3%, which was permitted in comparison with the system error. It was also concluded that only by eliminating the effect of the capillary force in experiments could the original HP formula be employed to predict the pressure-flowrate relation in the Hagen-Poiseuille flow in the micro-tube.
