Evaluation of Interfacial Friction Models in Stratified Flow: Gas-Liquid Two-Phase Flow

Abstract

This research entails evaluation of existing interfacial friction factor, gas-wall shear stress, and liquid wall shear stress correlations for the prediction of liquid holdup in pipelines. In addition, a statistical analysis was conducted on the predicted and measured flow parameters. Stratified horizontal two-phase flow equation was used in deriving an equation that solves for liquid holdup that is dependent on the interfacial shear stress. The model was implemented in a MATLAB integrated development environment to observe the effect of interfacial friction factors obtained from existing correlations. The results obtained from the comparative study of selected friction factors indicate that some of the correlations show high deviation from experimentally determined values. The largest deviation was observed in the model proposed by Sinai which was because of the condition for which it was originally developed is not suited for horizontal stratified two-phase gas-liquid flow. It was also observed that the correlation of Petalas and Aziz gave the best result and least deviation from the measured values. The performance of each correlation was observed to vary with the assumed values of liquid height. All the correlations gave good predictions at 30% liquid height but performed poorly at 40% liquid height.