Non-Contact State Assessment of Falling-Film Flow over Horizontal Tube Bundles Using High-Speed Imaging

High-speed imaging offers a non-intrusive approach for monitoring falling-film flows over horizontal tube bundles, but reflective images are difficult to quantify because grayscale variations are jointly affected by film geometry, interfacial curvature, surface slope, viewing angle, and local highlights. This study proposes an interpretable visual-proxy sensing framework for comparative state assessment of such flows. Isothermal water experiments were conducted on a five-row horizontal tube bundle over ReΓ=184-960. For each condition, 2000 grayscale frames were acquired at 2000 fps and analyzed within five fixed row-wise regions of interest. The image sequence was transformed by temporal-median background subtraction, local spatiotemporal mapping, moving-average detrending, and median-absolute-deviation normalization. The resulting normalized map Mn and dynamic renewal field G were used to extract four scalar descriptors: noise-corrected apparent renewal intensity IR, high-frequency fraction RHF, spectral peak frequency fp, and burst-event rate FB. Results show that Mn and G capture the transition from sparse column flow to more continuous sheet flow and reveal row-dependent activity organization. The descriptors provide complementary information on renewal intensity, frequency composition, dominant time scale, and intermittent events. Zero-response, noise-correction, and sensitivity tests confirm that the framework avoids structured pseudo-waves and maintains stable row-wise comparisons. The method provides a low-calibration visual sensing tool for relative falling-film state assessment.