A COMPARISON BETWEEN ULTRASONIC MEASUREMENTS AND THREE-DIMENSIONAL NUMERICAL SIMULATIONS OF BIPHASIC (AIR-WATER) FLOWS IN A HORIZONTAL PIPE

Gas-liquid two-phase flows (TPFs) are present in several industrial processes (e.g. oil-gas industry). Various studies on TPF ocus on developing empirical correlations based on large sets of experimental data for void fraction, which have proven accurate for the specific conditions for which they were developed, thus limiting their applicability. The focus of this study is the analysis of the TPF (slug flow) in a horizontal pipe in terms of void fraction using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and directly comparing the results with experimental measurements using an ultrasonic technique. A 29-m long, 54-mm ID horizontal pipe was used for the experiments. The two-phase CFI) model was implemented in CD-adapco STAR-CCM+ using the volume of fluid (VOF) model. A relatively good agreement (33.3 % error) was found between the experimental measurements and the CFD results for the void fraction. This shows that CFD can be used to predict void fraction and it can be used for design and scale-up processes.