📋 “DNS of mass transfer in gravity-driven turbulent bubble swarms: Effect of Eötvös number ” led by Nestor Vinicio Balcazar Arciniega and Joaquim Rigola from CTTC – UPC | Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya – Centre Tecnològic de Transferència de Calor
💧 The Eötvos number is a dimensionless quantity that allows to compare the effect of gravitational and surface tension forces in two-phase flows: gravity dominates at high Eötvös number and surface tension does when this number is low.
The team studied the mechanisms of mass transfer in gravity-driven bubble swarms at high a Reynolds numbers, characteristic of turbulent flows. They used a state-of-the-art computational approach,the Multi-Marker Unstructured Conservative Level-Set method, which enables highly accurate simulations of two-phase flows and bubble swarms with complex interfacial physics.
🖥 Thanks to RES supercomputer hashtag#MareNostrum5 GPP from Barcelona Supercomputing Center, they could design and improve predictive correlations for transport processes in turbulent bubbly flows: drag coefficient, interfacial area and Sherwood number, which contains the so-called mass transfer coefficient.
The generated data allowed the improvement of correlation used in two-fluid and Euler-Lagrange models, core for engineering multiphase systems, and key for optimizing industrial applications. These include chemical reactors, mass transfer unit operations, fermentation and flotation processes and thermal equipment, widely used in the energy and chemical industries.
👉 More info about the approach used in this project can be found at:
https://lnkd.in/d_dKHwj9
📸 The image show the results of the numerical simulations of gravity-driven flow in a swarm of deformable bubbles in a fully periodic domain. Vorticity induced by bubble-bubble interactions and path instabilities in the bubbles are also visible.
