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Direct numerical simulation of bubble rising in turbulence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 November 2024

Zehua Liu
Affiliation:
Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Princeton University, NJ 08544, USA
Palas Kumar Farsoiya
Affiliation:
Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Princeton University, NJ 08544, USA
Stéphane Perrard
Affiliation:
PMMH, CNRS, ESPCI Paris, Université PSL, Sorbonne Université, Université de Paris, 75005 Paris, France
Luc Deike*
Affiliation:
Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Princeton University, NJ 08544, USA High Meadows Environmental Institute, Princeton University, NJ 08544, USA
*
Email address for correspondence: ldeike@princeton.edu

Abstract

We describe the rising trajectory of bubbles in isotropic turbulence and quantify the slowdown of the mean rise velocity of bubbles with sizes within the inertial subrange. We perform direct numerical simulations of bubbles, for a wide range of turbulence intensity, bubble inertia and deformability, with systematic comparison with the corresponding quiescent case, with Reynolds number at the Taylor microscale from 38 to 77. Turbulent fluctuations randomise the rising trajectory and cause a reduction of the mean rise velocity $\tilde {w}_b$ compared with the rise velocity in quiescent flow $w_b$. The decrease in mean rise velocity of bubbles $\tilde {w}_b/w_b$ is shown to be primarily a function of the ratio of the turbulence intensity and the buoyancy forces, described by the Froude number $Fr=u'/\sqrt {gd}$, where $u'$ is the root-mean-square velocity fluctuations, $g$ is gravity and $d$ is the bubble diameter. The bubble inertia, characterised by the ratio of inertial to viscous forces (Galileo number), and the bubble deformability, characterised by the ratio of buoyancy forces to surface tension (Bond number), modulate the rise trajectory and velocity in quiescent fluid. The slowdown of these bubbles in the inertial subrange is not due to preferential sampling, as is the case with sub-Kolmogorov bubbles. Instead, it is caused by the nonlinear drag–velocity relationship, where velocity fluctuations lead to an increased average drag. For $Fr > 0.5$, we confirm the scaling $\tilde {w}_b / w_b \propto 1 / Fr$, as proposed previously by Ruth et al. (J. Fluid Mech., vol. 924, 2021, p. A2), over a wide range of bubble inertia and deformability.

Information

Type
JFM Papers
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press
Figure 0

Table 1. Parameters of the simulations of bubble rising in turbulence with various $We$, $Bo$, $d^*$, $Fr$, $Re_{\lambda }$, $Ga$, $St$, the initial drop-to-grid-size ratio $d/\Delta x$ and maximum refinement level $L$.

Figure 1

Figure 1. Rise dynamics of a bubble in a quiescent medium. (a,b) Velocity components and trajectories of two typical cases of bubble rise in quiescent flow. The two chosen cases are indicated in the $Ga$$Bo$ plot in (c) by the two asterisks with corresponding colours. (c) Randomness (colour coding) and path instability (symbol fillings) of bubble trajectories. Symbols represent DNS data, with filled being spiral or zigzagging trajectories and empty being recliner trajectories. The black solid line is the path instability onset curve from Cano-Lozano et al. (2013). The colour-coded trajectory randomness is characterised by the standard deviation of the horizontal speed of the bubble, i.e. $\sigma _h = \sqrt {\sigma _{u_b}^2+\sigma _{{v_b}}^2}$. (d) Colour-coded bubble rise speed in a quiescent medium. (e) Comparison of DNS and experimental fitting from Loth (2008). Drag coefficient as a function of the quiescent bubble Reynolds number, with the colour scale denoting the Morton number associated with different types of liquid. (f) Moving to turbulence, the turbulence intensity $Fr$ of the corresponding turbulent cases.

Figure 2

Figure 2. Bubble rise trajectories in quiescent and increasing turbulence intensities $Fr=0$, 0.25 and 0.75 for fixed $Ga=237$ and $Bo=2.7$. The instantaneous vertical speed is colour coded. Trajectories are shown over the same elapsed time $t/\sqrt {d/g}\in [0,47]$.

Figure 3

Figure 3. Bubble rising trajectories for different turbulence intensity and deformation extent shown in a box of $30d\times 30d\times 100d$. The colour code visualises the instantaneous bubble vertical velocity $\tilde {w}_b(t)$ in turbulence normalised by the terminal rising speed $w_b$ of the same bubble in the quiescent medium. All trajectories are recorded over the same time span with $\Delta t / \sqrt {d/g}=40$. The bubble shape at the end of each trajectory is displayed in the top left corner, enlarged for clarity. The projections of the trajectories are shown in horizontal and vertical planes. The Galileo numbers from top to bottom are 237, 79 and 40.

Figure 4

Figure 4. (a) Velocity signal of bubble rising in turbulence at $Fr=0.75$, $Ga=79$, $Bo=0.3$ and $We=0.125$, with the solid lines being the instantaneous velocity components and the dashed lines being the mean values. (b) Trajectory randomness characterised by the standard deviation of the horizontal speed ($\sigma _h = \sqrt {\sigma _{\tilde {u}}^2+\sigma _{\tilde {v}}^2}$), with the change between the turbulent and corresponding base quiescent case colour coded. The vertical speed of the bubble, sampled fluid, and the slip velocity at (c) $Fr=0.25$, $Ga=237$, $Bo=2.7$ and $We=0.125$ and (d) $Fr=0.75$, $Ga=79$, $Bo=0.3$ and $We=0.125$, and (e,f) their respective original histograms and smoothed probability density functions (smoothed with a moving average technique over each window).

Figure 5

Figure 5. The relative rising speed as a function of the Froude number for DNS with various $Bo$ and $We$ (coloured filled dots with $Bo$ colour coded), experiments of various $d^*$ (grey empty dots) and point-bubble simulations (grey crosses). The thicker lines show the $\tilde {w}_b/w_b = 1 -\chi \,Fr^2$ relation at low $Fr$ (Spelt & Biesheuvel 1997) and the $\tilde {w}_b/w_b=0.37/Fr$ scaling at high $Fr$ (Ruth et al.2021). The inset shows the standard deviation of the vertical speed of the bubble in turbulence normalised by the corresponding quiescent speed. The vertical speed shows a decreasing mean value but an increasing fluctuation as $Fr$ increases.

Figure 6

Figure 6. The mean value of the slip velocity fluctuation magnitude $\langle |\boldsymbol {U}_s'|\rangle$ (filled symbols) and vertical fluid velocity sampled by the bubble $\langle w\rangle$ (empty symbols) as a function of $Fr$, with $Bo$ colour coded. Symbol shapes represent different deformation extents and the slip velocity is defined based on the search diameter $1.5d< SD<2d$.

Figure 7

Figure 7. Grid convergence of (a) a typical quiescent case at $Ga=119$, $Bo=0.7$ and $We=0.125$ and (b) a turbulent case at $Fr=0.75$, $Ga=79$, $Bo=0.3$ and $We=0.125$. The dashed line represents the mean rise speed average over the time window $t/\sqrt {d/g} \in [16, 80]$, which excludes the effects of initial unsteady acceleration.

Figure 8

Figure 8. Properties of the homogenous and isotropic turbulent flow. (a) Kinetic energy and (b) Taylor-scale Reynolds number as a function of time. After the initial transient period, the turbulence properties reach a statistically stationary state and a bubble is inserted in this HIT flow. (c) Second-order longitudinal structure function $D_{LL}$ before and after the bubble insertion, compensated for by the turbulence scaling $(r\epsilon )^{-2/3}$. Turbulence theory for the inertial subrange $D_{LL}(r\epsilon )^{-2/3}=2$ is superimposed as a black dashed line. The bubble is inserted at $t=0$ and is of a size ${\sim }20\eta$ for most cases, comparable to the Taylor microscale and within the inertia subrange.