Thin liquid films are encountered in numerous engineering applications, such as the aerospace and the chemical process industry. Under the action of gravity, liquid films manifest waves at the free surface. Particularly, in interaction with co-current or counter-current gas flows, these waves might enhance heat and mass transfers between the two phases.
In several industrial applications the film is much thinner than the length of interfacial waves, therefore the liquid film can be modelled through an integral approach aiming to save computational cost and data with respect to direct numerical simulations.
This talk will review the integral modelling of thin liquid films and present an original numerical coupling to investigate the gas-liquid flow dynamics in narrow and large channels. Attention will be paid to the flooding phenomenon occurring in counter-current gas-liquid flows when the interfacial waves are driven upwards against the gravity, which is an unfortunate condition for many technological devices.