STABILITY OF THE GAS CORE OF A CYCLONIC TWO-PHASE SEPARATOR IN MICROGRAVITY

A microgravity experiment was designed to investigate the performance of a cyclonic two-phase separator. Surface tension effects could become important in microgravity, which adversely affects the separator performance. In the present study, the collapse of the gas core due to surface tension was investigated analytically as well as numerically. A control volume analysis and a volume-of-fluid-based computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation were employed to determine the condition for the gas core collapse. The predicted critical Weber numbers by both methods agree reasonably well. They predict that the critical Weber number is on the order of unity in the parametric range investigated herein. For practical purposes, the critical condition is also expressed in terms of the injection Weber number.