Instabilities of a gas-liquid flow between two inclined plates analyzed using the Navier–Stokes equations

Abstract

The paper is devoted to a theoretical analysis of a counter-current gas-liquid flow between two inclined plates. We linearized the Navier–Stokes equations and carried out a stability analysis of the basic steady-state solution over a wide variation of the liquid Reynolds number and the gas superficial velocity. As a result, we found two modes of the unstable disturbances and computed the wavelength and phase velocity of their neutral disturbances varying the liquid and gas Reynolds number. The first mode is a “surface mode” that corresponds to the Kapitza's waves at small values of the gas superficial velocity. We found that the dependence of the neutral disturbance wavelength on the liquid Reynolds number strongly depends on the gas superficial velocity, the distance between the plates and the channel inclination angle for this mode. The second mode of the unstable disturbances corresponds to the transition to a turbulent flow in the gas phase and there is a critical value of the gas Reynolds number for this mode. We obtained that this critical Reynolds number weakly depends on both the channel inclination angle, the distance between the plates and the liquid flow parameters for the conditions considered in the paper. Despite a thorough search, we did not find the unstable modes that may correspond to the instability in frame of the viscous (or inviscid) Kelvin–Helmholtz heuristic analysis.