Numerical simulation of adiabatic two phase flow in horizontal elbow bends

In industry there is need for predicting the morphology of two-phase liquid-gas flows that are part of e.g. distillation processes, pipeline transport units, chemical reactors or heat transfer units. Knowledge of the behavior of the flow and its regime facilitate for the engineers to have proper design of downstream processes and the pipeline in order to achieve the best reliable and economic outcome. One topic that is not studied sufficiently is the characterization of not fully developed flow due originated from insufficient developing or calming length as it can be found downstream of elbow bends and in short straight pipes, which are frequently encountered in industrial applications. In order to study this topic and characterize the flows, an experimental instrumentation was set up using Wire-mesh Sensors. This work is a numerical work using ANSYS CFX 19.1 in order to set up simulations of the experimentally investigated pipe geometries and flow regimes, followed by validation with the WMS data. Therefore, this work is concerned with gas-liquid flow in a horizontal straight pipe of DN50 and DN200 and horizontal elbow bends with the same diameters and curvature ratio of R/D=1. Each of the geometries is studied for annular and stratified wavy flow.