Flooding in a Small Diameter Tube (Influence of Tube Material)

Abstract

Flooding is one of very important designing factor of actual boiling system with counter-current two-phase flow. Consequently, many investigations have been conducted, but most of those investigations have been done with large diameter tubes. Thus, flooding characteristics under a small diameter tubes (I.D. < 10 mm) have not been fully understood so far. In this study, flooding experiment was conducted by using air-water adiabatic system with glass and acrylic resin tubes of 5 mm in inner diameter. As results, tube material did not influence on the critical flooding and flow reversal, but influenced on the flooding velocity and flooding pattern transitions. These flooding velocities have been estimated by using Wallis's correlation.