Stability of an air–water mixing layer: focus on the confinement effect

The shear instability occurring at the interface between a slow water layer and a fast air stream is a complex phenomenon driven by momentum and viscosity differences across the interface, velocity gradients as well as by injector geometries. Simulating such an instability under experimental conditions is numerically challenging and few studies exist in the literature. This work aims at filling a part of this gap by presenting a study of the convergence between two-dimensional simulations, linear theory and experiments, in regimes where the instability is triggered by the confinement, i.e. finite thicknesses of gas and liquid streams. It is found that very good agreement between the three approaches is obtained. Moreover, using simulations and linear theory, we explore in detail the effects of confinement on the stability of the flow and on the transition between absolute and convective instability regimes, which is shown to depend on the length scale of the confinement as well as on the dynamic pressure ratio. In the absolute regime under study, the interfacial wave frequency is found to be inversely proportional to the smallest injector size (liquid or gas).

Love wave or slip wave?

Conventional models of the structure of the earth, such as the Preliminary Reference Earth Model (PREM), assume a bonded interface between the crust and the upper mantle. The bonded contact model is consistent with the observation of Love waves during an earthquake. However, anomalies in the Love wave dispersion have been reported in the literature. When slip occurs at the crust-mantle interface, another kind of an interfacial wave, called the slip wave can exist. It is shown that the dispersion relation of the slip wave, with a slip weakening friction law, appears to be in agreement with the observations at seismic frequencies. This suggests that slip could occur at the crust-mantle interface.

Transmission Sensitivities of Contact Ultrasonic Transducers and Their Applications

In all ultrasonic material evaluation methods, transducers and sensors play a key role of mechanoelectrical conversion. Their transduction characteristics must be known quantitatively in designing and implementing suc+cessful structural health monitoring (SHM) systems. Yet, their calibration and verification have lagged behind most other aspects of SHM system development. This study aims to extend recent advances in quantifying the transmission and receiving sensitivities to normally incident longitudinal waves of ultrasonic transducers and acoustic emission sensors. This paper covers extending the range of detection to lower frequencies, expanding to areal and multiple sensing methods and examining transducer loading effects. Using the refined transmission characteristics, the receiving sensitivities of transducers and sensors were reexamined under the conditions representing their actual usage. Results confirm that the interfacial wave transmission is governed by wave propagation theory and that the receiving sensitivity of resonant acoustic emission sensors peaks at antiresonance.

The dominant frequency analysis of interfacial wave in wet-gas pipeline transportation based on NIR absorption

During the long-distance transportation of wet-gas, the dominant frequency is of great significance for the study of pipeline fatigue and damage, and the safety production. Therefore, the theoretical and experimental researches for dominant frequency are carried out increasingly. However, most of the current prediction correlation of dominant frequency are mainly applicable to atmospheric pressure conditions (0.1 MPa), and the prediction accuracy is not accurate enough. The paper obtains the time series signal of liquid film thickness by near-infrared (NIR) sensor, and then calculates the wave frequency by the power spectrum density (PSD). The performance of typical predictive correlation is evaluated and analyzed by utilizing the experimental data at different flow and pressure conditions (0.1–0.8) MPa. The structure of Strouhal number and Lockhart-Martinelli (L-M) parameter are optimized reasonably, the mean velocity of the liquid film surface, the density increment of gas core, the gas core mass flow and average liquid film velocity are considered in the L-M parameter, a modified interfacial wave frequency correlation is proposed. The results indicate that the mean absolute error of the predictive correlation is 9.06% (current data) and 25.64% (literature data). The new correlation has a better predictive accuracy.

Experimental and Numerical Study of Stratified Sloshing in a Tank under Horizontal Excitation

The density-stratified liquids horizontal sloshing was tested on a vibration table, and a series of laboratory experiments have been performed to analyze the influence of the excitation frequency on density-stratified liquids sloshing in a partially filled rectangular tank. The MultiphaseInterFOAM solver in OpenFOAM was employed to simulate two-layer fluids sloshing problems. The numerical results of dynamic pressure were validated against the experimental data, showing that the employed model can accurately simulate the stratified liquids sloshing phenomenon. Effects of two-layer fluids liquid depth ratio and total liquid depth on stratified sloshing characteristics were discussed in detail. The response law of the maximum interfacial wave elevation to external excitation frequency was presented in this study. The evolution of the velocity field of density-stratified liquids sloshing is also studied.

Numerical Study on an Interface Compression Method for the Volume of Fluid Approach

Many thermohydraulic issues about the safety of light water reactors are related to complicated two-phase flow phenomena. In these phenomena, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis using the volume of fluid (VOF) method causes numerical diffusion generated by the first-order upwind scheme used in the convection term of the volume fraction equation. Thus, in this study, we focused on an interface compression (IC) method for such a VOF approach; this technique prevents numerical diffusion issues and maintains boundedness and conservation with negative diffusion. First, on a sufficiently high mesh resolution and without the IC method, the validation process was considered by comparing the amplitude growth of the interfacial wave between a two-dimensional gas sheet and a quiescent liquid using the linear theory. The disturbance growth rates were consistent with the linear theory, and the validation process was considered appropriate. Then, this validation process confirmed the effects of the IC method on numerical diffusion, and we derived the optimum value of the IC coefficient, which is the parameter that controls the numerical diffusion.