A BUBBLE NUMBER DENSITY CONSTITUTIVE EQUATION

G GUIDO; P CARRICA; A CLAUSSE

NUCLEAR ENGINEERING AND DESIGN

ELSEVIER SCIENCE SA

Año: 1994 vol. 152 p. 213 - 224

0029-5493

A  statistical  formulation is used to describe  gas-liquid  two-phase  flows.  It  is shown  that  this kind  of flow cannot be considered a  dilute system  as  is currently done. A  correction factor,  the pair correlation function, is introduced to account  for  "dense effects". Integrating  the  transport  equation  of the  bubble  volume distribution  function  over all possible  volumes,  a number density transport equation is obtained, which  explicitly  accounts for bubble breakup and coalescence  phenomena. A  complete model  is constructed  in conjuction with  the mass  and momentum conservation equations.  Its  predictions were  compared  with  experimental  results  on  bubble  columns.  Excellent  agreement  was found. The theoretical model was able to predict the void fraction axial distributions, which showed strong variations.