An Application of Concomitant Measurements for Two-Phase Flow of Air-Water Mixture in Minichannels

The complex nature of two-phase flow itself creates obstacles in detecting, monitoring and description of flow patterns, which are directly related to spatial and temporal distributions of concentration in the mixture. In addition to this, difficulties in comparing results and noticed differences in reported results generated in different experiments require more extensive research toward finding a satisfactory explanation. Because of both high significance and difficulties in measurement of in-situ parameters including concentration measurements and existence of significant differences in the published results, one possible approach to reduce the differences is to conduct a comparative study of the measurement properties of the concomitant measurement systems for the same flow conditions (identical time and space). This reported experimental study focuses on the comparison of two different concentration measurement methods (capacitive and conductive system) including the determination of concomitancy for those two systems. In this investigation, a Computer Aided Experimentation System (CAES) is used to generate a broad range of flow conditions and flow patterns, where the in-situ concentrations are measured simultaneously in the same time and space for air-water heterogeneous mixture flow. Based on the in-situ concentration measurements (full range of concentration) from both capacitive and conductive systems, a direct comparison between the results is presented and the concomitancy between the two systems is determined.