Hydrodynamics of single bubble rising through water column using volume of fluid (VOF) method

Abstract

The importance of air bubble dynamics in liquid is in some phenomena like chemical and biochemical processes in refinery units. The 2D Volume of Fluid (VOF) method together with the CFD technique were employed for simulating. The dynamic meshing technique is used to simulate the hydrodynamics of rising air bubble in liquid water column via the User Defined Function (UDF) code in the C++ environment was developed to evaluate bubble rising through the water column. The rising of air bubble through a stagnant water column has been considered and the influence of column dimension, bubble size, and aspect ratio on the rising velocity characterized is investigated. The obtained results showed that the bubble rising velocity increase with the bubble size and its shapes was transformed from ellipsoidal-to-ellipsoidal cap shape. The rising velocity of air bubbles was affected by the column diameter. It was observed that the air bubble moving toward the top of the water column with oscillation for all cases. A good agreement was obtained between the rising velocity predicted in the simulation with that obtained from the literature.