This book is the outcome of more than fifteen years of teaching graduate courses on nuclear reactor thermal-hydraulics and two-phase flow, boiling, and condensation to mechanical, and nuclear engineering students. It is targeted to be the basis of a semester-level graduate course for nuclear, mechanical, and possibly chemical engineering students. It will also be a useful reference for practicing engineers.

The art and science of multiphase flow are indeed vast, and it is virtually impossible to provide a comprehensive coverage of all of their major disciplines in a graduate textbook, even at an introductory level. This textbook is therefore focused on gas–liquid two-phase flow, with and without phase change. Even there, the arena is too vast for comprehensive and in-depth coverage of all major topics, and compromise is needed to limit the number of topics as well as their depth and breadth of coverage. The topics that have been covered in this textbook are meant to familiarize the reader with a reasonably wide range of subjects, including well-established theory and technique, as well as some rapidly developing areas of current interest.

Gas–liquid two-phase flow and flows involving change-of-phase heat transfer apparently did not receive much attention from researchers until around the middle of the twentieth century, and predictive models and correlations prior to that time were primarily empirical. The advent of nuclear reactors around the middle of the twentieth century, and the recognition of the importance of two-phase flow and boiling in relation to the safety of water-cooled reactors, attracted serious attention to the field and led to much innovation, including the practice of first-principle modeling, in which two-phase conservation equations are derived based on first principles and are numerically solved.