The Concept of Drift Flux

The drift flux model is the most widely used diffusion model for gas–liquid two-phase flow. It provides a semi-empirical methodology for modeling the gas–liquid velocity slip in one-dimensional flow, while accounting for the effects of lateral (cross-sectional) nonuniformities. In its most widely used form, the DFM needs two adjustable parameters. These parameters can be found analytically only for some idealized cases and are more often obtained empirically. These empirically adjustable parameters in the model turn out to have approximately constant values or follow simple correlations for large classes of problems, however.

Recall that the diffusion models for two-phase flow only need one set of momentum conservation equations, often representing the mixture. Knowing the velocity for one of the phases (or the mixture), one can use the model's slip velocity relation (or its equivalent) to find the other phasic velocity. When used in the cross-section-average phasic momentum equations, the DFM thus leads to the elimination of one momentum equation. The mixture momentum equation can be recast in terms of mixture center-of-mass velocity. The elimination of one momentum equation leads to a significant savings in computational cost. Also, using the DFM, some major difficulties associated with the 2FM (e.g., the interfacial transport constitutive relations, the difficulty with flow-regime-dependent parameters, and numerical difficulties) can be avoided. These advantages of course come about at the expense of precision and computed process details.

Consider a one-dimensional flow shown in Fig. 6.1. Assume all parameters are time averaged.