The effect of tube diameter on vertical two-phase flow regimes in small tubes

By L. Chen, Y. Tian, T. Karayiannis. 2006

219 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Flow boiling flow patterns in four circular tubes with internal diameters of 1.10, 2.01, 2.88 and 4.26 mm were investigated in the present project. The experiments were conducted in vertical upward two-phase flow using R134a as the working fluid. The observed flow patterns include dispersed bubble, bubbly, confined bubble, slug, churn, annular and mist flow. The flow characteristics in the 2.88 and 4.26 mm tubes are similar to those typically described in normal size tubes. The smaller diameter tubes, 1.10 and 2.01 mm, exhibit strong “small tube characteristics” as described in earlier studies. The sketched flow maps show that the transition boundaries of slug-churn and churn-annular depend strongly on diameter. On the contrary, the dispersed bubble to churn and bubbly to slug boundaries are less affected. The transition boundaries are compared with existing models for normal size tubes showing poor agreement.

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ac432a9ba1055ae0a0674de200aaa9b4eae3585c

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Citations in the corpus

State-of-the-Art Overview of Boiling and Two-Phase Flows in Microchannels (2006, background): “[23] have done an extensive parametric study on the effect of tube diameter (diameters of 1.”
A review of small heat pipes for electronics (2016, background): “In general, a size classification is defined as follows [11, 12]: micro-channels (50 to 600 μm), mini-channels (600 μm to 3 mm) and conventional channels (Dh > 3 mm).”
Flow boiling in microchannels: Fundamentals and applications (2017, methodology): “[51] investigated the effect of tube diameter on flow patterns using R134a and a diameter range of 1.”
Experimentalstudy on porouscurrentcollectors of PEMelectrolyzers (2012, methodology): “Despite considerable differences in the reported definition of two-phase flow patterns in channels [26-37], it is generally agreed that flow regimes consist of dispersed bubbly flow, slug flow, churn flow, and annular flow.”