ISSN Online: 2379-1748
ISBN Flash Drive: 978-1-56700-469-4
ISBN Online: 978-1-56700-470-0
Second Thermal and Fluids Engineering Conference
NUMERICAL SIMULATION ON VERTICAL UPWARD GAS-LIQUID ANNULAR FLOW BASED ON THE S-CLSVOF METHOD
Abstract
Gas-liquid annular flow is widely encountered in many industrial applications, such as transportation of
natural gas and crude oil, gas-liquid separators, heat exchangers, nuclear reactors and U-tubes in steam
generators, etc. The flow characteristics of annular flow, especially the entrainment and deposition mechanism,
plays an important role in design and optimization of relevant industrial equipments. Based on the open source
CFD toolkit OpenFOAM, we developed an improved two-fluid computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model to
simulate the vertical upward two-phase annular flow. The gas core is described by a homogeneous mixture
consisting of gas phase and droplets, and the film is modeled as a continuous liquid film. The simple coupled
Volume of Fluid (VOF) with Level Set (LS) method (S-CLSVOF) is employed to track the interface between the
gas core and the liquid film. Then an active scalar equation is introduced to obtain the mass fraction of droplets
in the gas core. What's more, the mass transfer between the liquid film and the liquid droplet caused by the
entrainment and deposition processes is introduced by source terms of the governing equations. The liquid film
thickness, pressure drop, wall shear stress and disturbance wave parameters under different conditions are
studied by employing the proposed model. The obtained numerical results show a good agreement with the
experimental data reported in the literature.