Experimental modeling of steam-water countercurrent flow limit for perforated plates

An experiment on steam-water countercurrent flow limit (CCFL) was performed using perforated plates with variations of hole size, hole edge chamfer and plate thickness. The results show that coefficients in existing countercurrent flow correlations depend on those geometry variations. Based on the observations of the flow through a plate, a simple model for the estimation of countercurrent flow was derived. The model contains a parameter which is only dependent on plate geometry. The model was applied to experiment results from several plate geometries and closely predicted not only the CCFL for experiments performed during this work but also for other experiments performed with a larger size perforated plate. (author)