A broadly-applicable unified closure relation for Taylor bubble rise velocity in pipes with stagnant liquid

Taylor bubble velocity in slug flow is a closure relation which significantly affects the prediction of liquid holdup (or void fraction) and pressure gradient in mechanistic models of slug flow for oil and gas pipe applications. In this work, we use a validated Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) approach to simulate the motion of Taylor bubbles in pipes; the interface is tracked with a Level-Set method implemented in a commercial code. A large numerical database is generated covering the most ample range of fluid properties and pipe inclination angles explored to date (Eo ∈ [10, 700], Mo∈[1×10−6,5×103], andθ ∈ [0°, 90°]). A unified Taylor bubble rise velocity correlation is extracted from that database. The new correlation predicts the numerical database with 8.6% absolute average relative error and a coefficient of determination R2=0.97, and other available experimental data with 13.0% absolute average relative error and R2=0.84 outperforming existing correlations and models.