Abstract
In order to know the effects of gas-liquid inlet and mixing conditions on two-phase flows in microchannels, adiabatic experiments were conducted with changing a combination of inner diameters for the mixer and the microchannels. In the experiments, horizontal circular microchannels of 100, 176 and 251 μm diameter were used as the test channel, and water and nitrogen gas as the working fluids. It was observed that both “quasi-homogenous flow” and “quasi-separated flow” occurred if the area ratio of the microchannel to the mixer was below a certain value. Furthermore, void fraction and two-phase frictional multiplier were found to be smaller in the quasi-homogeneous flow than the quasi-separated one.
