Definition of a Facility for Experimental Studies of Two-Phase Flows and Heat Transfer in Porous Materials

摘要

A facility-development effort is currently underway at Sandia National Laboratories in order to create an experimental capability for the study of two-phase, steam/water flows through a variety of porous media. The facility definition phase of this project is described. Equations are derived for the steady, adiabatic, macroscopically-linear two-phase flow of a single-component fluid through a porous medium, including energy transfer both by convection and conduction. These equations are then solved to give relative permeabilities for the steam and water phases as functions of known and/or measurable quantities. A viable experimental approach was thereby formulated, leading to the definition of facility components and instrumentation requirements, including the application of gamma-beam densitometry for the measurement of liquid-saturation distributions in porous media. Finally, a state-of-the-art computer code was utilized to numerically simulate the proposed experiments, providing an estimate of the facility operating envelope. (ERA citation 06:020719)