Film Thickness and Pressure Drop for Gas-Liquid Taylor Flow in Microchannels

This paper investigates the hydrodynamics of gasliquid two-phase flow in an axisymmetric microchannel with a circular cross-sectional area.ANSYS Fluent was employed to simulate Taylor flow using the Volume of Fluid model to predict the interfacial phenomena between the two phases.Film thickness, bubble curvature, pressure drop, bubble/slug lengths are determined to investigate gas-liquid Taylor flow in micro capillaries.The results show that the liquid film thickness remains almost constant, but the length of the flat film region increases as the air bubble proceeds downstream.The predictions are validated with theoretical and experimental data in the literature, which show a good agreement.