Velocity field measurements of a disperse particle-liquid two-phase flow applying particle size discrimination

Disperse particle-liquid two-phase flows are of fundamental importance in a wide array of industrial and environmental processes, including chemical reactors, slurry transport, spray or mixing applications. Understanding their behaviour is essential for improving process efficiency, reactor design and modelling. However, diagnostic approaches repeatedly make critical simplifications, such as assuming identical behaviour of both phases, which leads to inaccuracies when describing transfer processes – especially when inertia becomes significant.
This work provides a framework for a modular low-cost open-source approach for phase-discriminated velocity field measurements in particle-liquid two-phase flows, which allows flexible configurations and implementations of additional methods. The method is applied to a turbulent particle-laden liquid-solid two-phase jet flow (Re=10000,φ_2=0…10^(-2)), where not only the accuracy of this method is verified, but importance of proper phase discrimination is highlighted as well, by showing the divergence in behaviour between the velocity fields of the continuous and dispersed phase.