The liquid wave characteristics during the transportation of air-water stratified co-current two-phase flow in a horizontal pipe

The understanding of the interfacial wave structure and its effect to the interfacial friction factor is important to reveal the transition from stratified to the slug flows. However, the available theoretical of models, as well as the correlations to predict the wave interfacial characteristics, is quite rare. The discrepancy among researchers is often found. In the present work, the wave characteristics of air-water stratified flow were investigated experimentally. The inner diameter was 26 mm. The liquid superficial velocity (J<inf>L</inf>) raised from between 0.02 m/s and 0.075 m/s while the gas superficial velocity (J<inf>G</inf>) ranged from 4 m/s to 16 m/s. A high speed camera was used to capture high-quality visual data which was later processed with the image processing technique. As a result, the quantitative parameters of the stratified flow were successfully determined and analyzed. Next, the dimensional analysis was carried out to develop correlation to predict the flow parameters of the wave such as the wave frequency, the wave velocity, the wave amplitude, and the wavelength. Furthermore, it is found that the ratio of gas and liquid Reynolds number and Martinelli Parameter plays important role in almost all of the proposed correlation. © 2019 Elsevier Inc.