Development and Validation of Advanced Theoretical Modeling for Churn-Turbulent Flows and Subsequent Transitions

The applicability of CFD codes for two-phase flows has always been limited to special cases due to the very complex nature of its interface. Due to its tremendous computational cost, methods based on direct resolution of the interface are not applicable to most problems of practical relevance. Instead, averaging procedures are commonly used for these applications, such as the Eulerian-Eulerian approach, which necessarily means losing detailed information on the interfacial structure. In order to allow widespread application of the two-fluid approach, closure models are required to reintroduce in the simulations the correct interfacial mass, momentum, and heat transfer.
It is evident that such closure models will strongly depend on the specific flow pattern. When considering vertical pipe flow with low gas volume flow rates, bubbly flow occurs. With increasing gas volume flow rates larger bubbles are generated by bubble coalescence, which further leads to transition to slug, churn-turbulent, and annular flow. Considering, as an example, a heated tube producing steam by evaporation, as in the case of a vertical steam generator, all these flow patterns including transitions are expected to occur in the system. Despite extensive attempts, robust and accurate simulations approaches for such conditions are still lacking.
The purpose of this dissertation is the development, testing, and validation of a multifield model for adiabatic gas-liquid flows at high gas volume fractions, for which a multiple-size bubble approach has been implemented by separating the gas structures into a specified number of groups, each of which represents a prescribed range of sizes. A fully-resolved continuous gas phase is also computed, and represents all the gas structures which are large enough to be resolved within the computational mesh. The concept, known as GENeralized TwO Phase flow or GENTOP, is formulated as an extension to the bubble population balance approach known as the inhomogeneous MUltiple SIze Group (iMUSIG). Within the polydispersed gas, bubble coalescence and breakup allow the transfer between different size structures, while the modeling of mass transfer between the polydispersed and continuous gas allows including transitions between different gas morphologies depending on the flow situations. The calculations were performed using the computational fluid dynamic code from ANSYS, CFX 14.5, with the support of STAR-CCM+ v8.06 and v9.02. A complete three-field and four-field model, including a continuous liquid field and two to three gas fields representing bubbles of different sizes, were first tested for numerical convergence and then validated against experimental data from the TOPFLOW and MT-Loop facilities.