An Experimental Investigation into the Effect of Surfactants on Air-Water Two-Phase Flow in Minichannels
Title:
An Experimental Investigation into the Effect of Surfactants on Air-Water Two-Phase Flow in Minichannels
Author:
English, Nathan J. Kandlikar, Satish G.
Appeared in:
Heat transfer engineering
Paging:
Volume 27 (2006) nr. 4 pages 99-109
Year:
2006-05-01
Contents:
The complex interfacial phenomena involved in two-phase gas-liquid flow have defied mathematical simplification and modeling. However, these systems are used in heat exchangers, condensers, chemical processing plants, nuclear reactor systems, and fuel cells. The present work considers a 1 mm-square minichannel and adiabatic flows corresponding to practical PEM fuel cell conditions. Pressure drop data is collected over mass fluxes of 4.0-12.0 kg/m2s for air and 0.5-21.6 kg/m2s for water, corresponding to superficial gas and liquid velocities of 3.19-10.06 m/s and 0.0005-0.022 m/s, respectively. The experiments are repeated with water-surfactant mixtures of different concentrations in order to quantify the surface tension effects, as it is recognized that surface tension is an important parameter for two-phase flow in minichannels. The accuracy of various two-phase pressure drop models is evaluated, and a new model for laminar-laminar two-phase flow pressure drop is developed.
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