Multidimensional effects in laminar filmwise condensation of water vapour in binary and ternary mixtures with noncondensable gases

This paper is dealing with the multidimensional modelling of gravity driven water vapour free convection condensation from binary and ternary mixtures of condensable and noncondensable gases. In the case of ternary mixtures, a special attention is paid to the influence of the light gas on the transport phenomena in the gaseous phase. Two solution methods have been applied: an analytical solution employing the boundary layer similarity approximation and a numerical solution of multi-fluid, multi-component formulation of the conservation equations. It has been demonstrated that the two methods are equivalent when applied to binary mixtures in simple geometries. However, to capture the spatial effects and the ternary mixture phenomena the latter method must be used. (C) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.