Numerical Study of Transient Conjugate Heat Transfer in a Long Two-Phase Pipeline

Abstract

A growing number of multiphase technology applications stimulate the development of reliable methods for modeling transient processes in two-phase systems in which the temperature field in the moving fluid and the temperature field in the bounding walls are directly dependent on each other. This situation presents a conjugate heat-transfer problem since the heat-transfer rate at the wall-fluid interface and local fluid conditions are not known a priori, and therefore need to be simultaneously calculated. Examples of such processes include the direct heating of multiphase pipelines, a change of heat load in evaporators of two-phase thermal control systems, startup or shutdown of systems with a two-phase working fluid. In this paper, direct electrical heating of a long two-phase pipeline has been modeled. The modeling of transient two-phase flow and heat transfer in the pipeline is based on two different mathematical formulations. In the first formulation, the transient heat conduction and the forced convection effects are rigorously taken into account. The second formulation assumes that the pipe wall and the fluid are in local thermal equilibrium. The effect of the thermal capacity of the pipe wall is taken into account by an additional term in the energy equation for the fluid flow. Such an approach allows significant simplifying the problem and reducing the computer running time. Numerical simulation of the sudden heat input to the pipe wall has been performed using both formulations of field equations. The practical significance of the results obtained is discussed.