Rotary honing: a variant of the Taylor paint-scraper problem

The three-dimensional flow in a corner of fixed angle α induced by the rotation in its plane of one of the boundaries is considered. A local similarity solution valid in a neighbourhood of the centre of rotation is obtained and the streamlines are shown to be closed curves. The effects of inertia are considered and are shown to be significant in a small neighbourhood of the plane of symmetry of the flow. A simple experiment confirms that the streamlines are indeed nearly closed; their projections on planes normal to the line of intersection of the boundaries are precisely the ‘Taylor’ streamlines of the well-known ‘paint-scraper’ problem. Three geometrical variants are considered: (i) when the centre of rotation of the lower plate is offset from the contact line; (ii) when both planes rotate with different angular velocities about a vertical axis and Coriolis effects are retained in the analysis; and (iii) when two vertical planes intersecting at an angle 2β are honed by a rotating conical boundary. The last is described by a similarity solution of the first kind (in the terminology of Barenblatt) which incorporates within its structure a similarity solution of the second kind involving corner eddies of a type familiar in two-dimensional corner flows.