International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer, Vol.41, No.18, 2821-2826, 1998
Surface tension effect in the two-fluids equation system
The difficulty of pressure discontinuity in the two-fluids formulation, caused by surface tension at the interface, can now be resolved by a new concept we call 'surface tension thickness'. It removes one of the major barriers that the conventional two-phase flow formulation has elicited : the ill-posedness of the differential equation system. The three sets of real eigenvalues we have found at the present formulation represent such existing two-phase flow regimes as the homogeneous, slug, and separated flows. The pressure wave propagation speeds in the two-phase flows predicted by the present formulation show good agreement with the experimental data.