Numerical modeling of annular flow in microchannel

Abstract

Recent experimental studies on flow boiling in micro-channels reveal that annular flow is the dominant two-phase flow pattern. This study is an initial effort towards the simulation of annular flow in micro-channels. In this article, two-phase axisymmetric flows with phase change are studied. The level-set method is used to track the interface between the phases. To overcome the mass conservation problem of the level-set method, a local mass correction (LMC) scheme is proposed. With the proposed LMC, mass is shown to conserve well even phase change occurs.