Ultrasound measurement of upward liquid film flow in vertical pipe

Wada, Yuki   ; Satou, Akira ; Shibamoto, Yasuteru ; Yonomoto, Taisuke ; Sagawa, Jun*

Liquid film detection under boiling transition (BT) condition is one of the important issues to develop models on dry out and rewet including physical characteristics of liquid film behavior. Although a heater surface temperature has been often used in previous studies to detect the position of liquid film front, it is difficult to accurately identify the position from the temperature measurement. Therefore, we are developing a nonintrusive measurement technique for detecting thin liquid film thickness under BT and rewet condition using ultrasound. In this study, we focus on high accuracy measurement for liquid film thinner than 0.1 mm by using high frequency ultrasound of 15 MHz and developing a signal processing method. Liquid film measurement results were found to agree with liquid film thickness correlations. Based on a comparison with constant current method, it is concluded that the present technique gives more reasonable liquid film thickness than constant current method.