Model Developments for Gas-Liquid, and Liquid-Liquid Systems

2019

I worked for 2 years on developing fundamental models for improving the understanding of droplet and gas bubble breakup in turbulent flows. The idea was to improve the breakup kernels for population balance equation to account for the entire turbulent energy spectrum via simulations and experimental validations. For instance the following plot shows the level of improvement achieved by including the entire turbulent spectrum in one of the breakup models (see the green lines). More details about this work is summarized in this presentation.

Additionally, high resolved simulations with dynamic mesh refinements were used to investigate the stochastic outcome from the droplet breakup. The simulations were validated in terms of droplet deformation time, number of fragments and specific breakup rates. Using the concept of energy barrier, it was found that the number of fragments are correlated with the interaction between turbulent eddies and droplets. The results of this work is relevant for mixing industries with the dominant presence of micro-bubbles.