Identification of two-phase water-air flow patterns in a vertical pipe using fuzzy logic and genetic algorithm

An automatic and intelligent system to recognize the two-phase water-air flow regime in a vertical tube based on fuzzy logic and genetic algorithm is proposed. Two approaches, volume of fluid (VOF) and Eulerian model, were used for the numerical simulation of gas-liquid two-phase flow. Four different turbulence models, i.e., k-ε RNG, k-ε standard, Reynolds stress and k-ε realizable, were employed. Image processing procedure was implemented to obtain the flow pattern. It was found that the k-ε RNG gives best results for turbulence modeling and the fuzzy logic code predicts the flow pattern well.