Copyright © 2010 Xia Wang and Xiaodong Sun. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

An interfacial area transport equation (IATE), proposed to dynamically describe the interfacial structure evolution of two-phase flows, could help improve the predictive capability of the two-fluid model. The present study aims to investigate the well-posedness issue of a one-dimensional two-fluid model with the IATE (named “two-fluid-IATE model” hereafter) using a characteristic analysis. The momentum flux parameters, which take into account the coupling of the volumetric fraction of phase and velocity distributions over the cross-section of a flow passage, are employed. A necessary condition for the system to achieve hyperbolicity under an adiabatic flow condition is identified. A case study is performed for an adiabatic liquid-liquid slug flow, which shows that the hyperbolicity of the two-fluid-IATE model is guaranteed if appropriate correlations of the momentum flux parameters are applied in the two-fluid-IATE model.