Effect of wall contact angle and carrier phase velocity on the flow physics of gas–liquid Taylor flows inside microchannels

Abstract

This paper investigates numerically the characteristics of gas–liquid sliding Taylor flow in a two-dimensional (2D) T-junction rectangular microchannel having both inlets perpendicular to the horizontal mixing chamber. The governing equations describing the flow are discretized and solved by employing finite volume method based computational tool ANSYS Fluent 15.0. The volume of fluid (VOF) multiphase method is used for capturing the gas–liquid interface. A dynamic mesh, based on the adaption of gradients of volume fraction, is used for grid refinement to tackle sharp gradients during the two-phase flow. A focus is laid on exploring the influence of wall contact angle on the flow physics of sliding Taylor flows inside the microchannel in which the inlet liquid velocity is varied in the range 0.05 < uL < 0.25 m/s) (or inlet Reynolds number, 4.97 < Re < 248.75), and the wall contact angle is varied in the range 0° < Θo < 170°. The effect of contact angle hysteresis on the overall pressure drop, bubble and liquid slug lengths, and the dispersed phase volume fraction is reported. The bubble length and the overall pressure drop obtained from the simulations are compared with the benchmark correlations available in the literature. It is found that the trends of the variation of bubble length with liquid velocity are in reasonable match with the correlations. In addition, the pressure drop and slug length decrease in hydrophilic channels unlike in hydrophobic channels, which signifies the importance of contact angle in two-phase sliding Taylor flows.