Empirical Modeling and Experimental Investigations on Isothermal Air-Water Two-Phase Flow through Horizontal Circular Minichannel

The experimentally developed flow pattern maps for micro-scale channels reported by various researchers differ significantly. Also, no theoretical models effectively predict the flow regime transition boundaries in micro-scale channel. The present work proposes an empirical model for air-water two-phase flow pattern transition boundaries for minichannel diameters between 2 to 5mm. Moreover, experiments are conducted with 2.5 mm diameter horizontal circular minichannel to develop a flow regime map. The proposed empirical model is found to provide good agreement with the experimental data. Comparisons are also shown with the work of Mandhane et al. (1974), Taitel and Dukler (1976), Barnea et al. (1983), Damianides and Westwater (1988), Coleman and Garimella (1999), Yang and Shieh (2001), Venkatesan et al. (2010).