Frictional pressure drop analysis for horizontal and vertical air-water two-phase flows in different pipe sizes

Abstract This study performs an experimental investigation of frictional pressure drop in air–water two-phase flows in straight pipes. A reliable experimental database for the two-phase pressure drop and void fraction is established with a differential pressure transducer and a four-sensor conductivity probe, respectively. The two-phase flow investigated focuses on gas-dispersed flow regimes in different pipe diameters of 38.1 mm, 50.8 mm, and 101.6 mm. Systematic study on the effects of flow orientation, flow regime and pipe size is performed. The most commonly used predictive models for the two-phase frictional pressure drop are evaluated with the newly established database and the existing databases found in the literature. It is demonstrated that both the conventional Lockhart-Martinelli approach and the ϕ f – α > correlation can generally predict the two-phase frictional pressure drop very well with different suggested values of coefficients C and n for different flow orientations, based on the established data. Meanwhile, the results show that the values of C and n are independent of the pipe size and the flow regime. The homogeneous flow model is evaluated with four β (ratio of volumetric flow rates) based mixture viscosity correlations. The predictions with the Beattie and Whalley mixture viscosity correlation are found to be the best regardless of the flow orientation. The Lockhart-Martinelli approach with the coefficient C calculated by correlation employed in the nuclear system analysis code RELAP5-3D and the Muller-Steinhagen and Heck correlation are also evaluated. It is found that these two modeling approaches as well as the homogeneous flow model tend to underestimate most of the experimental data. Improvements for pressure drop prediction in nuclear reactor safety analysis codes are observed.