Gas–liquid two-phase flow equal distribution using a wheel distributor

• We designed a special distributor to divide gas–liquid two-phase flow evenly.
• Experiments were carried out to verify the feasibility of the distributor.
• The influencing factors of the distributor were studied.

A specially designed wheel distributor is proposed to extract equal small fraction (7%) of gas and liquid from the total gas–liquid mixture. The distributor mainly consists in a wheel, splitting channels and two fluid receiving rooms. With the rotation of the wheel, the total flow is conducted alternately into main flow loop and sample loop through their corresponding splitting channels. The fraction of gas and liquid taken off is determined by the structure of the wheel distributor and independent of gas and liquid flow rate, flow patterns and the wheel rotation velocity. Experiments were carried out in an air–water two-phase flow loop to verify the feasibility of the device. The inner diameter of the test loop was 50 mm. the superficial gas velocity varied from 4.0 m/s to 22 m/s, and the superficial liquid velocity was within the range of 0.018–0.2 m/s. The flow pattern occurred during the experiments involved wave flow, slug flow and annular flow. Experimental results were in good agreement with the theoretical value. The advantages of the proposed distributor are that the fluid in the branch is extracted from the whole cross section instead of a local place and the phase splitting phenomenon is substantially eliminated.