Effect of Compressibility on Hyperbolicity and Choke Flow Criterion of the Two-phase Two-fluid Model

Abstract

The standard two-phase two-fluid model lacks hyperbolicity which results in oscillations in the numerical solutions. For the incompressible two-phase flows an exact correction term can be derived which when added to the momentum equations makes the model hyperbolic. No such straightforward approach exists for the similar compressible flows. In the current work, the effect of the compressibility on the characteristic equation is analyzed. It is shown that the hyperbolicity of the system depends only on the slip velocity and not on the phasic velocities, independently. Moreover, a slip Mach number is defined and a non-dimensional characteristic equation is derived. It is shown that for the small values of slip Mach number the effect of the compressibility on the hyperbolicity can be ignored. To verify the above analysis, the characteristic equation for the two-phase compressible flows is numerically solved and results compared with the values obtained with the analytical solution for incompressible flows. Numerical solution of the two-phase two-fluid model for the benchmark problem is used to further verify the abovementioned analysis. Furthermore, the eigenvalues of the characteristic equation are obtained as a power series expansion about the point where the slip Mach number is zero. These eigenvalues are used tomore » develop a choking criterion for the compressible two-phase flows.« less