Preface
Gas–liquid flows are ubiquitous in industrial and environmental processes. Examples are the transportation of petroleum products, the cooling of nuclear reactors, the operation of absorbers, distillation columns, gas lift pumps. Quite often corrosion and process safety depend on the configuration of the phases. Thus, the interest in this area should not be surprising.
The goal of this book is to give an account of scientific tools needed to understand the behavior of gas–liquid systems and to read the scientific literature. Particular emphasis is given to flow in pipelines.
The following brief historical account is taken from a plenary lecture by the author at the Third International Conference on Multiphase Flow, Lyon, France, June 8–12, 1998. (Int. J. Multiphase Flow 26, 169–190, 2000):
A symposiumheld at Exeter (P. M. C. Lacey) in 1965 brought together 160 people with a wide range of interests. Discussions at the 42 presentations indicated, to me, that something special was happening and that future directions of work on multiphase flow were being defined. This thrust was continued in conferences at Waterloo, Canada, in 1968 (E. Rhodes, D. S. Scott) and at Haifa, in 1971 (G. Hetsroni). Intellectual activity in ensuing years is exemplified by more focused conferences on Annular and Dispersed Flows held at Pisa, 1984 (S. Zanelli, P. Andreussi, T. J. Hanratty) and in Oxford, England, in 1987 (G. F. Hewitt, P. Whalley, B. Azzopardi), the Symposium on Measuring Techniques at Nancy (J. M. Delhaye, 1983) and the Conference on Gas Transfer at Heidelberg (Jähne, 1995). However, the 350 papers presented at the Second International Conference on Multiphase Flow in 1995 (A. Serizawa, Y. Tsuji) manifested a new level of activity.