Definition of a facility for experimental studies of two-phase flows and heat transfer in porous materials

A development effort currently underway to create an experimental capability for the study of two phase, steam/water flows through a variety of porous media 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 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.