Experimental investigation of gas-liquid separation with a new combined impacting junction

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Date
2021-06-03
Authors
Mohamed, Mohamed
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Abstract
A novel system of combined impacting tee junctions was designed to generate partial- and full-phase-separation data for air-water two phase flow. The system consisted of three horizontal and four vertical equal-sided impacting tee junctions of internal diameter 13.5 mm, having one (horizontal) inlet and two vertical (top and bottom) outlets. The experiments were conducted at a nominal pressure of 200 kPa (abs) and near-ambient temperature. For the full-phase-separation experiments, the inlet gas and liquid superficial velocity ranged from 0.2 to 39 m/s and from 0.0009 to 0.72 m/s, respectively. These conditions fell in the annular, slug and plug flow regimes. It was found that with the present system, the limiting conditions (gas and liquid inlet superficial velocities, JG1 and JL1, respectively) of full phase separation are almost double those of a system of three impacting junctions and quadruple those of a single impacting tee junction system. Outside the region of full phase separation, ten data points were chosen to study partial phase separation with mass split ratios (W3/W1) ranging from 0 to 1.0. These data points fell in the annular and slug flow regimes. A set of experiments were conducted at fixed JL1 of 0.6 m/s, with JG1 of 10, 20 and 30 m/s and at fixed JL1 of 0.3 m/s, with JG1 of 10 and 20 m/s. Both sets of results show that as JG1 decreases, more liquid exits through the bottom outlet (Outlet-3) which moves the partial-phase-separation curves in an anti-clockwise direction in the FG3 versus FL3 plot. The other set of experiments were conducted at fixed JG1 of 40 m/s, with JL1 of 0.01, 0.04 and 0.18 m/s. For these experiments, the partial-phase-separation curves did not show any consistent trend as JL1 was varied. The present system showed better phase separation compared to other systems of combined junctions and a single junction system with more liquid and less gas leaving through the bottom outlet. A phase separation parameter, η, was used to quantify the effectiveness of the system at separating the phases. It was found that η decreases with increasing JG1 or JL1. With the present system, η was higher for all partial-phase-separation experiments in comparison with a system of three impacting junctions and a single vertical tee junction system. In addition, the present system shows better phase-separation effectiveness when compared to other combined junctions reported in the literature.
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Two-phase flow, Phase separation, Impacting junction, gas-liquid separation
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