Many researches have been performed on the phenomenon of vapor condensation at the hypersonic stages of the steam turbine. This phenomenon consists of nucleation and droplet growth consequently. One of the most important parameters affecting the nucleation and droplet growth is surface tension, which is often assumed to be equal to the surface tension of a planar interface. The nucleated droplets have the nano-scale size at the beginning of the process and they will not be bigger than macro-scale after the growth. On the other hand, there are many reports about the dependency of surface tension on the curvature of the surface in such a small size. In order to evaluate the effects of curvature dependency on the surface tension, three famous models, proposed by Tolman, Benson and Rasmussen, were incorporated with nucleation theory and their effects on the wet steam flow were investigated. The results revealed that the dependency of the surface tension on the droplet radius significantly improved the accuracy of the predicted droplet radius. Also, it was shown that Tolman’s theory have offered the best results.

中文翻译：

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检查成核蒸汽流中表面张力的曲率依赖性

对于蒸汽轮机高超声速阶段的蒸汽冷凝现象已经进行了许多研究。因此，这种现象包括成核作用和液滴生长。影响成核和液滴生长的最重要参数之一是表面张力，通常认为该张力等于平面界面的表面张力。有核液滴在过程开始时具有纳米级尺寸，并且在生长后不会大于宏观级。另一方面，有许多关于在如此小的尺寸下表面张力对表面曲率的依赖性的报道。为了评估曲率依赖性对表面张力的影响，Tolman，Benson和Rasmussen提出了三个著名的模型，结合成核理论，研究了它们对湿蒸汽流动的影响。结果表明，表面张力对液滴半径的依赖性显着提高了预测液滴半径的准确性。另外，还证明了托尔曼的理论提供了最好的结果。