Two-phase flow pressure change subject to sudden contraction in small rectangular channels

This study investigates the pressure change and flow pattern subject to the influence of sudden contractions. The air and water mixture flows from small rectangular channels (2 × 4, 2 × 6, 4 × 4 and 4 × 6 mm, respectively) into a 2 mm diameter tube. The total mass flux (G) ranges from 100 to 700 kg/m2 s with gas quality (x) being varied from 0.001 to 0.8. In general the contraction pressure change increases with the rise of mass flux, and gas quality but an unique deflection of contraction pressure change pertaining to liquid vena contracta at a very low gas quality is encountered at a very low gas quality in the 4 ± 6 mm test section. For a low gas quality, elongated bubble prevails after the contraction, yet the size of elongated bubbles is reduced when the aspect ratio is increased. Comparisons amid the pressure change data of this study and available literature data with the predictions of existing model/correlations indicate that none of them can accurately predict the data. It is found that the influence of surface tension and outlet tube size, or equivalently the Bond number plays a major role for the departure of various models/correlations. Among the models/correlations being examined, the homogeneous model shows a little better than the others. Hence by taking account the influences of gas quality, Bond number, Weber number and area contraction ratio into the homogeneous model, a modified homogeneous correlation is proposed that considerably improves the predictive ability over existing correlations with a mean deviation of 30% to all the data.