Measurements of liquid-phase turbulence in gas-liquid two-phase flows using particle image velocimetry

Liquid-phase turbulence measurements were performed in an air-water two-phase flow loop with a circular test section of 50 mm inner diameter using a particle image velocimetry (PIV) system. An optical phase separation method-planar laser-induced fluorescence (PLIF) technique-which uses fluorescent particles and an optical filtration technique, was employed to separate the signals of the fluorescent seeding particles from those due to bubbles and other noises. An image pre-processing scheme was applied to the raw PIV images to remove the noise residuals that are not removed by the PLIF technique. In addition, four-sensor conductivity probes were adopted to measure the radial distribution of the void fraction. Two benchmark tests were performed: the first was a comparison of the PIV measurement results with those of similar flow conditions using thermal anemometry from previous studies; the second quantitatively compared the superficial liquid velocities calculated from the local liquid velocity and void fraction measurements with the global liquid flow rate measurements. The differences of the superficial liquid velocity obtained from the two measurements were bounded within +/- 7% for single-phase flows and two-phase bubbly flows with the area-average void fraction up to 18%. Furthermore, a preliminary uncertainty analysis was conducted to investigate the accuracy of the two-phase PIV measurements. The systematic uncertainties due to the circular pipe curvature effects, bubble surface reflection effects and other potential uncertainty sources of the PIV measurements were discussed. The purpose of this work is to facilitate the development of a measurement technique (PIV-PLIF) combined with image pre-processing for the liquid-phase turbulence in gas-liquid two-phase flows of relatively high void fractions. The high-resolution data set can be used to more thoroughly understand two-phase flow behavior, develop liquid-phase turbulence models, and assess high-fidelity codes for multi-phase flows.