THE NONEQUILIBRIUM RELAXATION MODEL FOR ONE-DIMENSIONAL FLASHING LIQUID FLOW

This paper presents a correlation for the relaxation time which is a c losure law for the homogeneous relaxation model (HRM). The HRM takes i nto account the non-equilibrium evaporation leading to the metastable liquid conditions. The purpose of this paper is to present the closed HRM and to show comparisons between its results and some available dat a. The possibility of the HRM to predict the critical mass-flow rates and the pressure distributions for one-dimensional hashing water flow has been validated. Although the model involves the use of several cor relations (friction, heat transfer and the relaxation time), no adjust ment of parameters against the data used for the comparison has been n eeded. Copyright (C) 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd.