Flow Structures and Frictional Characteristics on Two-Phase Flow in Microchannels in PEM Fuel Cells

Author(s):  
Eon Soo Lee ◽  
Carlos H. Hidrovo ◽  
Julie E. Steinbrenner ◽  
Fu-Min Wang ◽  
Sebastien Vigneron ◽  
...  

This experimental paper presents a study of gas-liquid two phase flow in rectangular channels of 500μm × 45μm and 23.7mm long with different wall conditions of hydrophilic and hydrophobic surface, in order to investigate the flow structures and the corresponding friction factors of simulated microchannels of PEMFC. The main flow in the channel is air and liquid water is injected at a single or several discrete locations in one side wall of the channel. The flow structure of liquid water in hydrophilic wall conditioned channel starts from wavy flow, develops to stable stratified film flow, and then transits to unstable fluctuating film flow, as the pressure drop and the flow velocity of air increase from around 10 kPa to over 100 kPa. The flow structure in hydrophobic channel develops from the slug flow to slug-and-film flow with increasing pressure drop and flow velocity. The pressure drop for single phase flow is measured for a base line study, and the fRe product is in close agreement with the theoretical value (fRe = 85) of the conventional laminar flow of aspect ratio 1:11. At the low range of water injection rate, the gas phase fRe product of the two phase flow based on the whole channel area was not substantially affected by the water introduction. However, as the water injection rate increases up to 100 μL/min, the gas phase fRe product based on the whole channel area deviates highly from the single phase theoretical value. The gas phase fRe product with the actual gas phase area corrected by the liquid phase film thickness agrees with the single phase theoretical value.

Author(s):  
Bofeng Bai ◽  
Maolong Liu ◽  
Xiaofei Lv ◽  
Wang Su ◽  
Xiao Yan ◽  
...  

An experimental study was conducted on the pressure drop of single phase and air-water two-phase flow in the bed of rectangular cross sections filled with uniform spheres densely. In the present flow-regime model, the bed was subdivided into a near-wall region and a central region. And a new empirical correlation for the prediction of single-phase flow pressure drops was proposed based on the model. The correlation can be used to predict the single phase pressure drop for both great tube-to-particle diameter ratio packed beds and small tube-to-particle diameter ratio packed beds and for the pebble beds packing with spherical particles and non spherical particles. A new empirical correlation for the prediction of two-phase flow pressure drops was proposed based on the gas phase relative permeability as a function of the gas phase saturation and the void fraction. The correlation fit well also for both experimental data points of spherical particles and non spherical particles.


Author(s):  
A. Nouri-Borujerdi

This paper investigates numerical simulation of one-dimensional homogeneous adiabatic gas-liquid two-phase flow in a rectangular microchannel with one boundary porous wall under the assumption of hydrophobic condition. Gas enters the microchannel with a uniform velocity and liquid is injected through the porous side wall. The present approach is to simulate water injection effects and developing mechanism of two-phase flow. The modeling and solution of the conservation equations provide pressure drop, vapor quality, void fraction and tow-phase mixture velocity for different water injection rates. The results show that velocity and pressure drop significantly perturbed when the water injection rate exceeds a critical value. Comparison between the results of the present work with the previous experimental work shows a good agreement.


Author(s):  
Christian Weinmu¨ller ◽  
Dimos Poulikakos

Microfluidics has experienced a significant increase in research activities in recent years with a wide range of applications emerging, such as micro heat exchangers, energy conversion devices, microreactors, lab-on-chip devices and micro total chemical analysis systems (μTAS). Efforts to enhance or extend the performance of single phase microfluidic devices are met by two-phase flow systems [1, 2]. Essential for the design and control of microfluidic systems is the understanding of the fluid/hydrodynamic behavior, especially pressure drop correlations. These are well established for single phase flow, however, analytical correlations for two-phase flow only reflect experimentally obtained values within an accuracy of ± 50% [3, 4]. The present study illustrates the effect of two-phase flow regimes on the pressure drop. Experimental measurement data is put into relation of calculated values based on established correlations of Lockhart-Martinelli with Chisholm modifications for macroscopic flows [5, 6] and Mishima-Hibiki modifications for microscale flows [7]. Further, the experimental pressure drop data is superimposed onto two-phase flow maps to identify apparent correlations of pressure drop abnormalities and flow regimes. The experiments were conducted in a square microchannel with a width of 200 μm. Optical access is guaranteed by an anodically bonded glass plate on a MEMS fabricated silicon chip. Superficial velocities range from 0.01 m/s to 1 m/s for the gas flow and from 0.0001 m/s to 1 m/s for the liquid flow with water as liquid feed and CO2 as gas. The analysis of the flow regimes was performed by imaging the distinct flow regimes by laser induced fluorescence microscopy, employing Rhodamine B as the photosensitive dye. The pressure drop was synchronically recorded with a 200 mbar, 2.5 bar and 25 bar differential pressure transmitter and the data was exported via a LabView based software environment, see Figure 1. Figure 2 illustrates the experimentally obtained pressure drop in comparison to the calculated values based on the Lockhard-Martinelli correlation with the Chisholm modification and the Mishima-Hibiki modification. For both cases the predications underestimate the two-phase pressure drop by more than 50%. Nevertheless, the regression of the experimental data has an offset of linear nature. Two-phase flow is assigned to flow regime maps of bubbly, wedging, slug or annular flow defined by superficial gas and liquid velocities. In Figure 3 the pressure drop is plotted as a surface over the corresponding flow regime map. Transition lines indicate a change of flow regimes enclosing an area of an anticline in the pressure data. In the direct comparison between the calculated and the measured values, the two surfaces show a distinct deviation. Especially, the anticline of the experimental data is not explained by the analytical correlations. Figure 4 depicts the findings of Figure 3 at a constant superficial velocity of 0.0232 m/s. The dominant influence of the flow regimes on the pressure drop becomes apparent, especially in the wedging flow regime. The evident deviation of two-phase flow correlations for the pressure drop is based on omitting the influence of the flow regimes. In conclusion, the study reveals a strong divergence of pressure drop measurements in microscale two-phase flow from established correlations of Lockhart-Martinelli and recognized modifications. In reference to [8, 9], an analytical model incorporating the flow regimes and, hence, predicting the precise pressure drop would be of great benefit for hydrodynamic considerations in microfluidics.


Author(s):  
Se´bastien Vigneron ◽  
Carlos H. Hidrovo ◽  
Fu-Min Wang ◽  
Eon-Soo Lee ◽  
Julie E. Steinbrenner ◽  
...  

This paper presents a theoretical model and a numerical simulation of a liquid-gas two-phase flow within a microchannel (50 μm × 500 μm × 2cm) equipped with distributed liquid water injection through the side walls. The modeling and solution of the conservation equations provide pressure drop as a function of inlet velocity. The influence of different parameters involving water injection is investigated, such as the quantity of water that is injected and the profile that is used to inject it. The numerical results show that for small water injection rates (1–10μL/min) the air flow velocity and pressure drop are not significantly perturbed by the presence of liquid water. But if water injection becomes important (10–100μL/min) larger pressure drops are observed. The influence of inlet pressure is also investigated. The model predictions are compared with experimental results obtained from testing a set of microchannels with a varying number of water injection slots on the side walls. Pressure drop distribution data from these experiments are consistent with model predictions.


2004 ◽  
Vol 127 (2) ◽  
pp. 204-209 ◽  
Author(s):  
Savalaxs Supa-Amornkul ◽  
Frank R. Steward ◽  
Derek H. Lister

In order to have a better understanding of the interaction between the two-phase steam-water coolant in the outlet feeder pipes of the primary heat transport system of some CANDU reactors and the piping material, themalhydraulic modelling is being performed with a commercial computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code—FLUENT 6.1. The modeling has attempted to describe the results of flow visualization experiments performed in a transparent feeder pipe with air-water mixtures at temperatures below 55°C. The CFD code solves two sets of transport equations—one for each phase. Both phases are first treated separately as homogeneous. Coupling is achieved through pressure and interphase exchange coefficients. A symmetric drag model is employed to describe the interaction between the phases. The geometry and flow regime of interest are a 73 deg bend in a 5.9cm diameter pipe containing water with a Reynolds number of ∼1E5-1E6. The modeling predicted single-phase pressure drop and flow accurately. For two-phase flow with an air voidage of 5–50%, the pressure drop measurements were less well predicted. Furthermore, the observation that an air-water mixture tended to flow toward the outside of the bend while a single-phase liquid layer developed at the inside of the bend was not predicted. The CFD modeling requires further development for this type of geometry with two-phase flow of high voidage.


2012 ◽  
Vol 134 (9) ◽  
Author(s):  
Manmatha K. Roul ◽  
Sukanta K. Dash

Two-phase flow pressure drops through thin and thick orifices have been numerically investigated with air–water flows in horizontal pipes. Two-phase computational fluid dynamics (CFD) calculations, using the Eulerian–Eulerian model have been employed to calculate the pressure drop through orifices. The operating conditions cover the gas and liquid superficial velocity ranges Vsg = 0.3–4 m/s and Vsl = 0.6–2 m/s, respectively. The local pressure drops have been obtained by means of extrapolation from the computed upstream and downstream linearized pressure profiles to the orifice section. Simulations for the single-phase flow of water have been carried out for local liquid Reynolds number (Re based on orifice diameter) ranging from 3 × 104 to 2 × 105 to obtain the discharge coefficient and the two-phase local multiplier, which when multiplied with the pressure drop of water (for same mass flow of water and two phase mixture) will reproduce the pressure drop for two phase flow through the orifice. The effect of orifice geometry on two-phase pressure losses has been considered by selecting two pipes of 60 mm and 40 mm inner diameter and eight different orifice plates (for each pipe) with two area ratios (σ = 0.73 and σ = 0.54) and four different thicknesses (s/d = 0.025–0.59). The results obtained from numerical simulations are validated against experimental data from the literature and are found to be in good agreement.


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