We investigate argon bubble flow in liquid gallium within a container large enough to avoid wall effects. Flow with and without applied horizontal magnetic field is studied. We demonstrate the successful capture and quantification of the effects of applied magnetic field using dynamic neutron radiography and the previously developed and validated robust image processing pipeline, supported by the in silico reproduction of our experiment. Significant reduction of the amplitude of bubble tilt angle variations due to applied horizontal magnetic field is successfully resolved through a 30 mm thick liquid metal layer. Our results clearly show the potential of expanding the range of gas/liquid metal systems that can be studied using downscaled though representative experimental setups.
This paper presents detailed results of neutron imaging of argon bubble flows in a rectangular liquid gallium vessel with and without the application of external horizontal magnetic field. The developed image processing algorithm is presented and its capability to extract physical information from images of low signal-to-noise ratio is demonstrated. Bubble parameters, velocity components, trajectories and relevant statistics were computed and analysed. A simpler version of the code was applied to the output of computational fluid dynamics simulations that reproduced the experiment. This work serves to further validate the neutron radiography as a suitable method for monitoring gas bubble flow in liquid metals, as well as to outline procedures that might help others to extract data from neutron radiography images with a low signal-to-noise ratio resulting from high frame rate acquisitions required to resolve rapid bubble motion.
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