The pressure drop of gas-liquid two-phase flow in microchannel is of fundamental importance in heat and mass transfer processes. In this work,the pressure drop of gas-liquid two-phase flow in horizontal rectangular cross-section microchannels was measured by a pressure differential transducer system. Water,ethanol and n-propanol were used as liquid phase to study the effects of capillary number on pressure drop;air was used as the gas phase. Four microchannels with various dimensions of 100 μm× 200 μm,100 μm× 400 μm,100 μm× 800 μm and 100 μm× 2000 μm(depth × width) were used for determining the influence of configuration on the pressure drop. Experimental results showed that in micro-scale,the capillary number also affected the pressure drop remarkably,and in spite of only one-fold difference in aspect ratio,the variation of pressure drop reached up to near three times under the same experimental conditions. Taking the effects of aspect ratio and surface tension into account,a modi-fied correlation for Chisholm parameter C in the Chisholm model was proposed for predicting the frictional multi-plier,and the predicted values by the proposed correlation showed a satisfactory agreement with experimental data.
MA Youguang JI Xiyan WANG Dongji FU Taotao ZHU Chunying
Bubble formation in an opposite-flowing T-shaped microchannel with 40 μm in depth and 120 μm in width was real-time visualized and investigated experimentally by means of a high speed camera. N2 bubbles were generated in glycerol-water mixtures with different concentrations of surfactant sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS). And the images were captured by the high speed camera linked to a computer. Results indicated that the bubble formation process can be distinguished into three consecutive stages, i.e., expansion, collapse and pinching off. The bubble size decreases with the increase of liquid flow rate and viscosity of liquid phase as well as the decrease of gas flow rate. The surface tension of the liquid phase has no measurable influence on the bubble size. Moreover, a new approach to predicting the size of bubbles formed in the T-shaped microchannel is proposed. And the predicted values agree well with the experimental data.
