Publications Repository - Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf

High void fraction multiphase-flow regimes are commonly encountered in the nuclear industry where safety analysis of nuclear power plants requires reliable predictions on steam-water flows in case of different accident scenarios. Within the boiling phenomena in pipes, a transition throughout different flow patterns from bubbly to churn to annular flow is expected to occur. Those flow regimes, characterized by very high void fractions, are represented by different scales in terms of their gas structures.

It is known that computational fluid dynamics (CFD) has been widely developed for single phase flows, but strongly limited in the case of multiphase flows. This is due to the high complexity on representing its gas-liquid interface. Furthermore, most of the recent advances in code development and validation for multiphase flow have been addressed specifically to bubbly flows. In the case of such low void fraction regimes, the widely known averaging Eulerian multi-fluid approach is commonly used to describe its scales characterized by interfacial structures smaller than the grid size. For flow situations with large-scale interfaces, like annular or horizontal stratified flows, interface tracking methods are commonly used. Since in the case of high void fraction regimes, such as churn-turbulent flow, dispersed flows and large interfaces occur simultaneously, a combination of these modeling approaches could be needed.

This paper presents the application of a recently developed concept for the treatment of multiphase flows where different scales in terms of interfacial structures can be found. This approach, known as Generalized TwO Phase flow or GENTOP, considers the definition of fully-resolved continuous gas phase where the continuous gas summarizes all gas structures which are large enough to be resolved within the computed mesh. The concept works as part of an extension of the bubble population balance approach known as the inhomogeneous MUltiple SIze Group (MUSIG), which allows the consideration of different bubble size groups, each with its own velocity field inside the dispersed phase. 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 considering transitions between different gas morphologies depending of the flow situations. Within the concept, different parametric studies have been made for co-current vertical gas-water pipe flow, and comparisons against experimental data for all the current calculations are shown. The experiments have been conducted in the TOPFLOW and the MT Loop facilities at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf.