Comparative study of homogeneous nucleation rate models for wet steam condensing flows

摘要

To accurately describe the homogeneous nucleation process in a wet-steam dual-phase flow and to improve the reliability of computations of the condensing steam flow, classical homogeneous nucleation theories were derived and summarized based on the molecular agglomerate thermodynamic free energies. To obtain more accurate homogeneous nucleation rates, various modified homogeneous nucleation rate models were described. Experimental data were used in a comparative study of these models to select a nucleation rate model to provide calculated values for engineering projects. This study indicates that the main difference between different nucleation theories lies in the difference in the influence of temperature on the nucleation rate.