This award will support the participation of ten U.S. scientists in a U.S.-Japan Seminar on Two-Phase Flow Dynamics, to be held July 5-11, 1992 in Berkeley, California. The co-organizers are Professor Virgil Schrock, Department of Nuclear Engineering, University of California Berkeley, and Professor Tadashi Sakaguchi, Department of Production Engineering, Kobe University, Japan. Two-phase flow dynamics is a short name for the complex problems that involve the transient and steady state motions of fluids comprised of more than one phase. Such flows are especially challenging to analyze because the interface separating the phases is usually moving and changing in a very complex way that depends upon mechanical, thermodynamic, and sometimes chemical effects. This seminar will deal with selected topics in two-phase flow dynamics that are fundamental problems in their own right and are central to analysis of large complex energy systems, especially the transient behavior of such systems and their esponses in hypothetical accident scenarios. The research now underway by the U.S. and Japanese seminar participants has begun to identify new approaches that hold the promise of substantial improvement in the predictive capability of two-phase flow analysis. The participants will discuss the current state of knowledge in this field and the difficult unresolved problems, and they will attempt to develop a vision of how the subject can be advanced and what directions for future research will be most promising.
