Numerical simulation for transverse migration of finite-size clean bubbles in homogeneous shear turbulence

Abstract

Turbulent bubble flow applications for fluid engineering are becoming increasingly common. The horizontal movement of turbulent bubble flow in the vertical shear flow is considered to be the most important. With the goal of clarifying the mechanism of action of the turbulence on the lateral movement of an emerging bubble, a simulation model is proposed in this study to describe the motion properties of spherical bubbles in a homogeneous mixture under the influence of vertical shear forces. With the assumption that light solid particles are treated as surfactants, it may be those that cause the bubble to be contaminated. In this study, the submerged boundary method is used to represent a spherical bubble. At the same time, the authors have built a numerical model to directly simulate the motion of finite size bubbles to assess the effect of homogeneous shear disturbances on the horizontal movement of bubbles. The analysis of the numerical model shows that the finite-sized clean bubbles have the direction of horizontal traversal reversal in uniform shear motion. Comparing the results with those for contaminated bubbles, it is found that the transverse migration in the reversed direction is more pronounced for clean bubbles.