Experimental and numerical investigations of a two-phase wavy flow

This paper presents the experimental and numerical investigation of a stratified shear two-phase flow originally studied by Thorpe (1969). An experimental facility has been developed during the NURESAFE project in order to reproduce the experiments of Thorpe, together with newly developed characterization techniques based on image processing. Moreover, new experiments were performed using the same pair of fluids, i.e. water and kerosene, as well as with a new pair of fluids: water and n-hexane. These results constitute a valuable validation case for CFD solvers. NEPTUNE_CFD solver was benchmarked against this new test case. It did not predict accurately the most unstable wavelength even in the case where the instability is 2-D, which demonstrate that such yet simple validation case is still challenging for CFD.