Phenomenological description of phase inversion.

We propose an extended Ginzburg-Landau model for a description of the ambivalence region associated with the phenomenon of phase inversion observed in dispersed water-oil flow through a pipe. In analogy to the classical mean-field theory of phase transitions, it is shown that a good quantitative representation of the ambivalence region is obtained by using the injected phase volume fraction and a friction factor as the appropriate physical parameters.