Correlations for predicting single phase and two-phase flow pressure drop in pebble bed flow channels

Abstract

An experimental study was conducted on the pressure drop of the single phase and the air–water two-phase flow in the bed of rectangular cross sections densely filled with uniform spheres. Three kinds of glass spheres with different equivalent diameters (3 mm, 6 mm, and 8 mm) were used for the establishment of the test sections. The Reynolds number in the experiment ranged from a dozen to thousands for the single-phase flow and from hundreds to tens of thousands for the two-phase flow. In the present flow-regime model, the bed was subdivided into a near-wall region and a central region in order to take the wall effect into account to improve the prediction at low tube-to-particle diameter ratios. Improved correlations are obtained based on the previous study to consider the single-phase flow pressure drops for finite pebble beds with spherical particles and nonspherical particles by fitting the coefficients of that equation to both the database and the present experiment. The correlation is consistent with the observed physical behavior which explains its comparatively good agreement with the experimental data. A new empirical correlation for the prediction of two-phase flow pressure drops was proposed based on the gas phase relative permeability as a function of the gas phase saturation and the void fraction. The correlation fit well for both experimental data of spherical particles and nonspherical particles.