Numerical Study of the Lift Force, Velocities and Pressure Distribution of a Single Air Bubble and Two Interacting Air Bubbles Rising in Quiescent Liquid

Abstract

The study of multiphase flow consisting of liquid and air bubbles has been attracting the interest of many researchers. Numerical methods for such a system are, however, facing difficulty in numerical accuracy and a heavy computational load. In this paper, we made corrections to the modified force-coupling method in our previous papers and applied it to the numerical studies of a single air bubble rising near a vertical wall and two interacting air bubbles rising in line in quiescent liquid. Corrections were made to the effective ranges of the force-coupling method. The calculation results showed that the lift force acting on an air bubble obtained by the experimental data was more accurately reproduced than those by our previous method. We accurately calculated the time evolution of the velocities of interacting two air bubbles rising in line obtained in the previous experiments and resolved the physical mechanism of the relative movement of two bubbles. We also found the present method is much quicker and needs much smaller memory capacity than other methods, such as the volume of fluid method.