Turbulent shear control with oscillatory bubble injection

Abstract

It is known that injecting bubbles into shear flow can reduce the frictional drag. This method has advantages in comparison to others in simplicity of installation and also in environment. The amount of drag reduction by bubbles depends on the void fraction provided in the boundary layer. It means, however, that certain power must be consumed to generate bubbles in water, worsening the total power-saving performance. We propose oscillatory bubble injection technique to improve the performance in this study. In order to prove this idea of new type of drag reduction, velocity vector field and shear stress profile in a horizontal channel flow are measured by ultrasonic velocity profiler (UVP) and shear stress transducer, respectively. We measure the gas-liquid interface from the UVP signal, as well. This compound measurement with different principles leads to deeper understanding of bubble-originated drag reduction phenomena, in particular for unsteady process of boundary layer alternation. At these experiments, the results have demonstrated that the intermittency promotes the drag reduction more than normal continuous injection for the same void fraction supplied.