Morphology of Flashing Feeds at Critical Fluid Properties in Larger Pipes

Abstract

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Tailored conditioning and control of flashing feeds in industrial applications requires knowledge of the evolving flow morphology and phase fractions along the feed pipe. Design methods obtained from reference systems (e.g. water-air) are hardly applicable for commercial scales and critical fluid properties (e.g. high vapor densities, low surface tension). In this study, the flow morphology of flashing feeds in a novel refrigerant test rig at critical fluid properties was analyzed using wire-mesh sensors at two locations along the feed pipe and experimental data from the water-air system.

A New Research Infrastructure for Investigating Flow Hydraulics and Process Equipment at Critical Fluid Properties

“…The DN200 hydraulic test section as well as the DN300/DN500 test separator are built in a sectional manner to allow changes in design and routing according to the requirement of future measurement campaigns. First results obtained from the test rig will be published in subsequent articles [20,21].…”

Flow Morphologies in Straight and Bent Horizontal Pipes

“…WMSs 22 installed at multiple positions downstream the inlet were used to visualize the flow morphology and the phase distribution in the pipe cross sections. 22−25 WMSs have already been used to visualize twophase flows in horizontal 26,27 and vertical pipes. 22−24 The measurement principle is based on the local conductivity of the gas−liquid flow.…”