CFD modelling of flow and heat transfer in the Taylor flow regime

Transport phenomena in the Taylor flow regime for gas–liquid flows in microchannels have received significant attention in recent years. Whilst the hydrodynamics and mass transfer rate in the Taylor flow regime have been studied extensively using experimental and numerical techniques, studies of heat transfer in Taylor flow have been neglected. In this work, the flow and heat transfer in this regime is studied using the volume of fluid (VOF) and level-set techniques to capture the gas–liquid interface, as implemented in the ANSYS Fluent and TransAT codes, respectively. The results obtained from the two different codes are found to match very closely. Fully-developed flow and heat transfer are studied using the VOF method for a Reynolds number (Re) of 280, Capillary number (Ca) of 0.006 and homogeneous void fraction (β) of 0.51 for constant wall heat flux (H) and constant wall temperature (T) boundary conditions. The Nusselt numbers obtained for both cases are 2.5 times higher than those for liquid-only flow. The effects of the mixture velocity and the homogeneous void fraction on flow and heat transfer are also studied.

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