| Two-phase gas-liquid flow occurs in many types of industrial boiling and condensing heat transfer equipment, including the reactor cores of boiling water nuclear reactors (BWRs) and the steam generators of pressurized water reactors (PWRs). In annular flow, the liquid phase often travels as both a thin film around the wall (containing disturbance waves and base film) and as entrained droplets in the central gas core. Gas bubbles are also often entrained into this film.;Annular flow displays several quantifiable flow behaviors, including pressure loss, disturbance waves, and film thickness, along with micro-scale velocity profiles and fluctuations in the liquid film. The conventional approach to annular flow closely links film thickness and pressure loss, but relies on an assumed film velocity profile and does not consider disturbance waves explicitly. The present work seeks to explore a more complete range of behaviors in both horizontal and vertical flow to explore the relationships among them and thereby improve modeling of annular flow.;Several of these investigations employ quantitative visualization. Modern optics and computing (in the form of non-trivial data reduction codes) are applied to the study of two-phase flow to process images of a physical experiment to quantify behavior information. Quantitative visualization allows for rapid acquisition of a large volume of flow behavior data, which allows for analysis of the flow behaviors themselves and how they relate to one another and to global modeling. By integrating behavior data from these quantitative visualizations and other conventional experimental investigations, a new two-region (base film and disturbance wave) model is proposed that can be implemented given only flow rates, external geometry, and fluid properties. |
