This study aims to experimentally investigate the two-group interfacial area transport in small diameter pipes. Experimental data focusing on the bubbly to slug transition regime, namely one-group to two-group transport region, are collected in a 12.7 mm vertical pipe under adiabatic, air-water conditions. The result shows the intergroup transfer in the small diameter pipe can be drastic, especially under low superficial liquid velocities. The cause of this phenomenon is mainly due to the large relative bubble size comparing to the pipe cross-sectional area. The wake entrainment effect could be enhanced by the small spherical bubbles that are acting like cap or slug bubbles in a medium-size pipe. Based on the experimental observation, a throughout analysis of the dependence of the drastic intergroup transfer is provided in this study. The models predicting the initiation of drastic intergroup transfer in small diameter pipes in terms of the bubble diameter and the void fraction are developed. These models are compared with the two-phase data among the different pipe sizes and the results show a good agreement. These newly developed models are applied to the IATE wake entrainment model by developing a transition function analogous to the sigmoid function. With the transition function, the revised IATE model is given the new ability on predicting the drastic intergroup transfer phenomenon.
This experimental study focuses on the characteristics of air-water two-phase interfacial structure. Interfacial parameters including void fraction, interfacial area concentration, and bubble interfacial velocity are measured using four-sensor electrical conductivity probe on a 12.7 mm ID vertical tube. The tube size is approximately equal to the maximum distorted bubble size. Therefore, the bubbly-to-slug transition characteristics can be different from in other sizes of tubes. Comparing with previous studies, this study provides an experimental database with a wide range on the bubbly-to-slu…
Slug flows are extremely interesting multiphase regime phenomena which frequently occur in flexible marine risers used by the petroleum industry in offshore environments and have both a liquid and gaseous phase. This paper describes two simple models of the slug flow regime by means of an equivalent monophase flow with a non-constant density. The slug regime is modelled as a monophase density-varying flow with a sinusoidal density, travelling along the pipe itself towards the top end node of the riser. Starting from the bottom end, it is characterized by adiabatic processes and energy loss alo…
We show that Directed Percolation (DP) simulations in a pipe geometry in 3+1 dimensions fully capture the observed complex phenomenology of the transition to turbulence. At low Reynolds numbers (Re), turbulent puffs form and spontaneously relaminarize. At high Re, turbulent slugs expand uniformly into the laminar regions. In a spatiotemporally intermittent state between these two regimes of Re, puffs split and turbulent regions exhibit laminar patches. DP also captures the main quantitative features of the transition, with a superexponentially diverging characteristic lifetime below the transi…
We perform direct numerical simulations of a kerosene-water mixture in pipe flow under realistic experimental conditions by solving the Cahn-Hilliard-Navier-Stokes equations. We compute the linear stability of core-annular flow of kerosene and water in a vertical pipe and find that it is highly unstable. By performing DNS initialized with a slightly perturbed core-annular flow, we show that the system transitions to turbulence and finally relaxes into a turbulent slug flow regime provided that the pipe is sufficiently long. This configuration presents mild turbulence and large scale three-dime…
Recently, experimental series of co-current gas-liquid upward bubbly flows in a 6 m-height and 54.8 mm i.d. vertical titanium pipe had been conducted at the TOPFLOW thermal hydraulic test facility, Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf, Germany. The experiments were initially performed to develop a high quality database of two-phase flows as well as to validate new CFD models. An ultrafast dual-layer electron beam X-ray tomography, named ROFEX, was used as measurement system with high spatial and temporal resolutions. The gathered cross sectional grey value image results from the tomography sca…
Microfluidics technology offers high efficiency of heat and mass transfer and low safety hazards compared to conventional multiphase processes. The multiphase flow in the microchannels is usually characterized as Taylor flow that includes elongated microbubbles , separated by liquid slugs. In the current study, we employ OpenFOAM CFD package to investigate the effect of the surface tension and the contact angle on the interfacial surface area and transport yield in microscale systems. The results show that contact angle can significantly affect the surface area and the bubble size while the su…
Transitional pipe flow is modeled as a one-dimensional excitable and bistable medium. Models are presented in two variables, turbulence intensity and mean shear, that evolve according to established properties of transitional turbulence. A continuous model captures the essence of the puff-slug transition as a change from excitability to bistability. A discrete model, that additionally incorporates turbulence locally as a chaotic repeller, reproduces almost all large-scale features of transitional pipe flow. In particular it captures metastable localized puffs, puff splitting, slugs, a continuo…
Present study explores the capability of the pseudopotential-based thermal lattice Boltzmann (LB) model in emulating the underlying thermohydrodynamics of flow boiling in a narrow fluidic channel. In contrary to the conventional Eulerian-averaging-based approach, it adheres to the mesoscopic Boltzmann statistical averaging, which allows natural phase separation and no need of assuming the initial interface. A narrow fluidic channel, with specified inlet temperature and flow rate, and exit pressure, housing a microheater at the bottom wall is considered as the computational domain of interest. …
In the chemical, petroleum and nuclear industries, pipelines are often used to transport fluids from one process site to another one. The understanding of the fluids behavior inside the pipelines is the most important consideration for the engineers and scientists. From the previous studies, there are several two-phase flow patterns in horizontal pipe. One of them is stratified flow pattern, which is characterized by the liquid flowing along the bottom of the pipe and the gas moving above it cocurrently. Another flow patterns are slug and plug flow patterns. This kind of flow triggers the dama…
This paper describes a study of the generation of a plughole vortex and its consequences in a drainpipe during drainage of water from a stationary rectangular tank. The critical and minimum depths of water above the inlet of the drainpipe, where a surface dip starts to develop for drainpipes of various diameters, were examined parametrically. This study explored the following naturally occurring phenomena arising from a plughole vortex. (i) A plughole vortex initially causes a surface dip to develop towards the inlet of the drainpipe and as the surface dip approaches the inlet of the drainpipe…
Slug flows are a typical intermittent two-phase flow pattern that can occur in submarine pipelines connecting the wells to the production facility and that is known to cause undesired consequences. In this context, computational fluid dynamics appears to be the tool of choice to understand their formation. However, few direct numerical simulations of slug flows are available in the literature, especially using meshless methods which are known to be capable of handling complex problems involving interfaces. In this work, a 2D study of the instability processes leading to the formation of interm…
Multiphase flow simulations were run in an eccentric annulus. The dimensions of the annulus were 0.1 and 0.05 m for the outer and inner cylinders, respectively, and the mixture velocities were between 1.2 and 4.2 m/s. The simulations were compared with fully eccentric and completely concentric experiments conducted at the Institute for Energy Technology. The purpose of this paper is to explore the effect of the holdup fraction and interior pipe's position on the pressure gradient and flow regime. The comparisons indicate that moving the pipe from an entirely eccentric to a partially eccentric …
We investigate the relationship between the thermal properties of a micro pulsating heat pipe (MPHP) and the internal flow characteristics. The MPHP consists of an eleven-turn closed-loop of a meandering square microchannel with a hydraulic diameter of $350\ {}μ{\rm m}$ engraved on a silicon substrate. The MPHP charged with Fluorinert FC-72 tends to exhibit higher effective thermal conductivities for the coolant temperature of $T_{\rm c} = 40\ {}^\circ\mathrm{C}$ compared to $T_{\rm c} = 20\ {}^\circ\mathrm{C}$, and provides the highest effective thermal conductivity of about $700\ {}{\rm W/(m…
Using extensive direct numerical simulations, the dynamics of laminar-turbulent fronts in pipe flow is investigated for Reynolds numbers between $Re=2000$ and $5500$. We here investigate the physical distinction between the fronts of weak and strong slugs both by analysing the turbulent kinetic energy budget and by comparing the downstream front motion to the advection speed of bulk turbulent structures. Our study shows that weak downstream fronts travel slower than turbulent structures in the bulk and correspond to decaying turbulence at the front. At $Re\simeq 2900$ the downstream front spee…
Fully 3-dimensional computations of flow through a long pipe demand a huge number of degrees of freedom, making it very expensive to explore parameter space and difficult to isolate the structure of the underlying dynamics. We therefore introduce a `2+epsilon' dimensional model of pipe flow which is a minimal 3-dimensionalisation of the axisymmetric case: only sinusoidal variation in azimuth plus azimuthal shifts are retained, yet the same dynamics familiar from experiments are found. In particular the model retains the subcritical dynamics of fully resolved pipe flow, capturing realistic loca…
Recently, highly resolved experiments and simulations have provided detailed insight into the dynamics of turbulent pipe flow. This has revived the interest to identify mechanisms that generate chaotic transients with super-exponential growth of lifetime as a function of a control parameter, the Reynolds number for pipe flow, and with transitions from bounded chaotic patches to an invasion of space of irregular motion. Dynamical systems models are unique tools in this respect because they can provide insight into the origin of the very long life time of puffs, and the dynamical mechanism leadi…
Imperial College London（伦敦帝国理工学院）；BP Plc（英国石油公司）；Florida State University（佛罗里达州立大学）；Newcastle University（纽卡斯尔大学）
The modelling of multiphase flow in a pipe presents a significant challenge for high-resolution computational fluid dynamics (CFD) models due to the high aspect ratio (length over diameter) of the domain. In subsea applications, the pipe length can be several hundreds of kilometres versus a pipe diameter of just a few inches. In this paper, we present a new AI-based non-intrusive reduced-order model within a domain decomposition framework (AI-DDNIROM) which is capable of making predictions for domains significantly larger than the domain used in training. This is achieved by using domain decom…
Taylor bubbles are a feature of the slug flow regime in gas-liquid flows in vertical pipes. Their dynamics exhibits a number of transitions such as symmetry-breaking in the bubble shape and wake when rising in downward-flowing and stagnant liquids, respectively, as well as breakup in sufficiently turbulent environments. Motivated by the need to examine the stability of a Taylor bubble in liquids, a systematic numerical study of a steadily-moving Taylor bubble in stagnant and flowing liquids is carried out, characterised by a dimensionless inverse viscosity ($Nf$), and Eötvös ($Eo$), and Froude…
In this paper, we study the nonlinear dynamics of an axisymmetric disturbance to the laminar state in non-rotating Poiseuille pipe flows. In particular, we show that the associated Navier-Stokes equations can be reduced to a set of coupled Camassa-Holm type equations. These support inviscid and smooth localized travelling waves, which are numerically computed using the Petviashvili method. In physical space they correspond to localized toroidal vortices that concentrate near the pipe boundaries (wall vortexons) or wrap around the pipe axis (centre vortexons) in agreement with the analytical so…
One-dimensional models are presented for transitional shear flows. The models have two variables corresponding to turbulence intensity and mean shear. These variables evolve according to simple equations based on known properties of transitional turbulence. The first model considered is for pipe flow. A previous study modeled turbulence using a chaotic tent map. In the present work turbulence is modeled instead as multiplicative noise. This model captures the character of transitional pipe flow and contains metastable puffs, puff splitting, and slugs. These ideas are extended to a limited mode…
The subcritical transition to turbulence, as occurs in pipe flow, is believed to generically be a phase transition in the directed percolation universality class. At its heart is a balance between the decay rate and proliferation rate of localized turbulent structures, called puffs in pipe flow. Here we propose the first-ever dynamical mechanism for puff proliferation -- the process by which a puff splits into two. In the first stage of our mechanism, a puff expands into a slug. In the second stage, a laminar gap is formed within the turbulent core. The notion of a split-edge state, mediating …
We present a study on the nonlinear dynamics of small long-wave disturbances to the laminar state in non-rotating axisymmetric Poiseuille pipe flows. At high Reynolds numbers, the associated Navier-Stokes equations can be reduced to a set of coupled Korteweg-de Vries-type (KdV) equations that support inviscid and smooth travelling waves numerically computed using the Petviashvili method. In physical space they correspond to localized toroidal vortices concentrated near the pipe boundaries (wall vortexons) or that wrap around the pipe axis (centre vortexons), in agreement with the analytical so…
