Study on Gas-Liquid Two-Phase Flow Distribution Inside a Flute Header

When the supercritical boiler is working at low load during flexible operation, the uneven distribution of the gas-liquid flow at the intermediate header may affect the safety of the water-cooled wall at the vertical parallel panels. In order to improve the uniformity of gas-liquid flow distribution in the water-cooled wall of intermediate header and study the internal flow mechanism, a flute inside the header is applied with parallel vertical parallel channels and experiments under different operating conditions are conducted to verify the effectiveness of this geometrical structure. The flow pattern in the experiment belongs to stratified and wavy flow. Computational fluid dynamic (CFD) simulation is conducted in order to investigate two-phase flow distribution behavior inside a flute header. It was found that the radial gas phase distribution in the flute tube shows a symmetrical relationship, and there are two vortexes in opposite directions. With the increasing distance from the inlet, the uniformity of the gas phase distribution becomes even. The gravity is greater than the drag force, which has effect on the two-phase flow distribution. The gas phase velocity has been improved inside flute section and liquid phase flow has more even flow distribution along annular section. It makes liquid phase sent to far end of flute header. That benefits two-phase flow distribution along 10 parallel channels equally.