Flow regime identification using chaotic characteristics of two-phase flow

Chaotic nature of two-phase flow is investigated for its dependency upon the flow regime by constructing the pseudo phase space with the time sequential impedance signals of the void fraction. In order to construct the pseudo phase space, the autocorrelation function (ACF) and the average mutual information (AMI) for the delayed time, and the false nearest neighborhood (FNN) for the dimensions as the embedding parameters were employed here. It was found that the delayed time and embedded dimension are highly dependent upon the flow regime. To visualize the trajectory of signals in the phase space, a density map is produced by the projection of the trajectory into the two-dimensional plane which is correspondent with the two-dimensional probability distribution functions (2D-PDF). Since the density map of 2D-PDF showed clear distinction of flow patterns, we developed a method to identify flow regime by applying simple classification rules to the density map. The proposed method successfully identifies the flow regimes of the experimental data of impedance signals for the void fraction produced flow regime map for the vertical channel with diameter of 25.4 and 50.8 mm. (c) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.