Measurement of liquid film thickness in air — water two phase flows in conventional and mini channels using image processing

Abstract

The measurement and study of liquid films in the case of two phase flows is significant in many heat transfer and mass transfer applications, such as chemical process industries, micro reactors, coating processes and in boilers. The focus of the present study was to measure and characterize the thickness of the liquid films for various two phase flow regimes in conventional and in mini channels using a non-intrusive technique. Experiments were performed on tubes of diameters 0.6, 1.5, 2.6 and 3.4mm. The superficial velocities of gas and liquid are in the range of 0.01–50 and 0.01–3m/s, respectively. The flow patterns were recorded with a high speed camera. A method to determine the two phase flow velocity using image registration has been discussed. Morphological processing and gray scale analysis were used to determine the liquid film thickness and characterize the flow regimes. The flow patterns identified are bubbly, dispersed bubbly, slug, slug-annular, wavy-annular, stratified, and annular. The flow regimes were validated with flow maps available in the literature. The liquid film thickness was identified by distance transform technique in image processing. The magnitude of film thickness varied with liquid and gas flow velocities. The film thickness was represented in terms of capillary number. The variation in film thickness along the length of the flow regime has been discussed. A relation between the liquid film thicknesses measured using the non-intrusive image processing technique and capillary number for the conventional and mini tubes is proposed based on the analysis. $$\begin{array}{*{20}c} {\frac{h} {d} = 2.03Ca^{0.13} We^{0.52} for Bo > 1} \\ {\frac{h} {d} = 1.08Ca^{0.4} We^{0.35} for Bo < 1} \\ \end{array} $$