The transient flow mechanism and intermittent film thickness evolution regulation of droplet mode for horizontal tube falling film

Abstract The behavior of falling film over horizontal has significant impacts on the efficiency of heat and mass transfer for the horizontal tube evaporators and absorbers especially for intermittent droplet model at low spray density, which has lower heat and mass transfer resistance. Thus it is critical to illuminate transient and intermittent flow mechanism of droplet dynamic behavior and film thickness evolution regulation over horizontal tube falling film at low spray density. A two dimension multi-phase flow mode for superhydrophilic surface was established to capture the microscopic flow mechanism. The results indicated that droplet generation and growth stages accounted for more than half of the droplet life cycle and an obvious droplet retraction and pulsation were first observed during droplet generation due to surface tension and local additional pressure. Further, the whole life cycle transient and intermittent film thickness map of droplet mode was depicted. And found that the liquid film thickness transient evolution regulation of droplet mode could be split into two zones: impact zone and stable zone. For impact zone, the film thickness was rapidly decreased with the spreading of the liquid film from the millimeter level to 200 μ m within 0.2 s. While for stable zone, film thickness almost maintained stable over a long period time until the next droplet impacted. Because of the intermittent of droplet generation and movement, the change of film thickness of droplet mode with spray Reynolds was achieved by increasing impact frequency of droplet impact instead of the volume of a single droplet.