Empirical Modeling and Experimental Investigations on Isothermal Air-Water Two-Phase Flow through Horizontal Circular Minichannel

The experimentally developed flow pattern maps for micro-scale channels reported by various researchers differ significantly. Also, no theoretical models effectively predict the flow regime transition boundaries in micro-scale channel. The present work proposes an empirical model for air-water two-phase flow pattern transition boundaries for minichannel diameters between 2 to 5mm. Moreover, experiments are conducted with 2.5 mm diameter horizontal circular minichannel to develop a flow regime map. The proposed empirical model is found to provide good agreement with the experimental data. Comparisons are also shown with the work of Mandhane et al. (1974); Taitel and Dukler (1976), Barnea et al. (1983), Damianides and Westwater (1988), Coleman and Garimella (1999), Yang and Shieh (2001), Venkatesan et al. (2010).