Abstract
Two-phase pipe flow is a common occurrence in many industrial applications such as power generation and oil and gas transportation. Accurate prediction of liquid holdup and pressure drop is of vast importance to ensure effective design and operation of fluid transport systems. In this paper, a Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) study of a two-phase flow of air and water is performed using OpenFOAM. The two-phase solver, interFoam is used to identify flow patterns and generate values of liquid holdup and pressure drop, which are compared to results obtained from a two-phase mechanistic model developed by Petalas and Aziz (2002). A total of 60 simulations have been performed at three separate pipe inclinations of 0°, +10° and -10° respectively. A three dimensional, 0.052m diameter pipe of 4m length is used with the Shear Stress Transport (SST) k - ɷ turbulence model to solve the turbulent mixtures of air and water. Results show that the flow pattern behaviour and numerical values of liquid holdup and pressure drop compare reasonably well to the mechanistic model.
Highlights
Two-phase flow is a particular class of multiphase flow that is limited to the relative motion of two phases of immiscible fluids with different physical properties
60 separate Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations for two-phase flow have been completed on an air/water mixture at three separate inclinations using the interFoam solver with comparison to the Petalas and Aziz mechanistic model
All flow patterns observed in the CFD analysis were consistent with the mechanistic model prediction; dispersed bubble and froth flow deviated from observations reported in the literature due to the limited mesh density in the longitudinal direction
Summary
Two-phase flow is a particular class of multiphase flow that is limited to the relative motion of two phases of immiscible fluids with different physical properties It is common in many industrial applications such as power generation, oil and gas transportation and combustion systems. Current methods for hydrodynamic modelling of two-phase flow typically comprise of either empirical or mechanistic models. Empirical models such as the well-known Beggs and Brill method [2] are an improvement of earlier homogeneous models as they provide a basis for the creation of flow regime maps and contain specific correlations for calculating liquid holdup and pressure drop. A mechanistic transport equation is generally written for each of the phases in the system and best estimate mechanistic or correlational sub-models are used for parameters which
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