Convective diffusion in a tube with non-uniform inlet conditions

Convective diffusion in Poiseuille Row is investigated for a non-uniform di stribution of the diffusing constituent at the tube inlet. The analytical s olution is provided together with an efficient method to evaluate it numeri cally, including an appropriate recurrence-calculation scheme that facilita tes the numerical effort. The solution is illustrated by considering releva nt examples from the literature. In particular, homogeneous nucleation in a laminar flow diffusion chamber is analyzed, and the results show that the usual experimental inlet non-uniformities have a significant influence on t he calculation of the saturation ratio and the nucleation rate. (C) 2000 El sevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.