Premium
Two‐phase pressure drop caused by sudden flow area contraction/expansion in small circular pipes
Author(s) -
Roul Manmatha K.,
Dash Sukanta K.
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
international journal for numerical methods in fluids
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.938
H-Index - 112
eISSN - 1097-0363
pISSN - 0271-2091
DOI - 10.1002/fld.2322
Subject(s) - mechanics , pressure drop , reynolds number , computational fluid dynamics , contraction (grammar) , two phase flow , compressibility , materials science , pipe flow , flow (mathematics) , thermodynamics , physics , turbulence , medicine
Theoretical studies have been made to determine the pressure drops caused by abrupt flow area expansion/contraction in small circular pipes for two‐phase flow of air and water mixtures at room temperature and near atmospheric pressure. Two‐phase computational fluid dynamics (CFD) calculations, using Eulerian–Eulerian model (with the air phase being compressible for pipe contraction case) are employed to calculate the pressure drop across sudden expansion and contraction. The pressure drop is determined by extrapolating the computed pressure profiles upstream and downstream of the expansion/contraction. The larger and smaller tube diameters are 1.6 and 0.84 mm, respectively. Computations have been performed with single‐phase water and air, and two‐phase mixtures in a range of Reynolds number (considering all‐liquid flow) from 1000 to 12 000 and flow quality from 1.2 × 10 −3 to 1.6 × 10 −2 . The numerical results are validated against experimental data from the literature and are found to be in good agreement. The expansion and contraction loss coefficients are found to be different for single‐phase flow of air and water, and they agreed reasonably well with the commonly used theoretical predictions. Based on the numerical results as well as experimental data, correlations are developed for two‐phase flow pressure drops caused by the flow area contraction as well as expansion. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.