Numerical Simulation of the Interfacial Growth of the Stratified Wavy Two-Phase Flow in the Horizontal Rectangular Channel

Abstract

Two-phase flow is one of the important phenomena that are found in nuclear reactors. It is required for the design and the safe operation of nuclear reactors to understand and predict the two-phase flow phenomenon by numerical analyses. This paper describes the numerical simulation of the interfacial growth of the stratified wavy two-phase flow in the horizontal rectangular channel. This flow is the cocurrent flow separated by gravity and a fundamental flow pattern of two-phase flow. The influence of the channel width upon the growth of the interfacial wave was evaluated by carrying out several simulations for the different channel width. The numerical simulation model adopted in this paper is a one-component two-phase fluid model of the lattice Boltzmann method. This model has been developed and utilized for numerical analyses of two-phase flow in recent years because it has the capability of simulating spontaneous phenomena of the interface between phases. The wave growth was observed and the dimensionless numbers that characterize the two-phase flow state were measured during the computations. The relation between the wave growth and the dimensionless numbers, which were obtained as the computational results was compared with that in the flow pattern map proposed on the basis of theoretical consideration by Taitel and Dukler. It was verified in the case of the wide channel width that the simulated relation was in agreement with that in the theoretical flow pattern map. It was shown that the narrower the channel width became, the more mass flow rate of the rare phase the interfacial growth needed and the obtained relation deviated from that in the flow pattern map.