2.1. Turbulence generation and bubble injection

The experiment consists of a ${0.37}\ \textrm {m}^{3}$ tank filled with deionized water, as sketched in figure 2(a). Turbulence in the water is generated by four submerged water pumps (Eco-Worthy 1100 GPH 12 V Bilge Pumps), the flow from each of which is split at a T into two parallel jets. Each of the four sets of parallel jets is positioned at the corner of a horizontal 25 cm square, and the convergence of the jets creates a turbulent region at the centre of the square. Compared with other turbulence-generation systems that use comparable submerged pumps (Variano & Cowen Reference Variano and Cowen2008; Byron et al. Reference Byron, Tao, Houghton and Variano2019), ours is constructed at a much smaller scale, giving the on/off state of any pump much greater influence on the immediate state of the flow in the turbulent zone. Therefore, instead of employing a randomly generated pattern with which to activate each pump, we run each pump continuously.

Figure 2.

(a) A schematic of the experiment, showing the air injection needle and representative bubble trajectory, pumps submerged in a water tank to create turbulence, a laser and high-speed camera for particle image velocimetry and two cameras for three-dimensional bubble tracking. (b) A bubble trajectory (blue) and the region of strong turbulent fluctuations in one of the nine particle image velocimetry planes (red).

The resulting flow field consists of a region of intense turbulence where the jets meet. Below that region, there is decreasing turbulence and a significant downwards flow (out of the converging zone), comparable in magnitude to the bubbles’ rise velocity. In our experiment, we take advantage of this heterogeneity to probe a range of turbulent conditions in a single experiment, as the turbulent fluctuations and length scales change considerably.

Bubbles are injected through a needle fed by a pressurized air line at the bottom of the tank, with the injection rate controlled by a flow controller (Alicat). The injection rate is slow enough to enable the tracking of bubbles optically, and the void fraction (${\ll }0.1\,\%$) is sufficiently low that we expect no feedback onto the turbulence from the bubbles (Rensen, Luther & Lohse Reference Rensen, Luther and Lohse2005). The typical distance between a bubble and its closest neighbour is approximately 5 cm, above 10 times the typical bubble diameter. Our tank is left open to the atmosphere, and it will become contaminated with surfactants (typically reaching a steady state in contamination after half an hour), which will adsorb to the bubble interfaces (Van Dorn Reference Van Dorn1966; Clift et al. Reference Clift, Grace and Weber1978; Henderson & Miles Reference Henderson and Miles1990; Deike, Berhanu & Falcon Reference Deike, Berhanu and Falcon2012).

To confirm that the results are not merely a result of the turbulence generation method, a second set of experiments was carried out in a similar, smaller tank involving pump-generated turbulence with a different spatial arrangement of pumps, and similar turbulence characterization and bubble tracking methods. This set-up is described in Appendix B, and the main results reported in this paper are shown using data from both experiments.

2.2. Turbulence characterization with particle image velocimetry

The turbulent flow field is characterized with two-dimensional, two-component particle image velocimetry (PIV) (Thielicke & Stamhuis Reference Thielicke and Stamhuis2014) performed in 9 parallel planes, each separated by approximately 2 cm. The water is seeded with ${25}\ {\mathrm {\mu }}\textrm {m}$ polyamide 12 particles with a seeding density of approximately ${30}\ \textrm {g}\ \textrm {m}^{-3}$. The imaged plane is illuminated with a sheet of 532 nm light generated with a 2 W laser and optics and imaged with a high-speed camera (Phantom VEO4K-PL) equipped with a 100 mm lens. The duration between the two frames used to calculate each velocity field is 1/1400 s, and the duration between each velocity field is 1/100 s. For each plane, approximately 3 min of data are obtained. The location of the front and back planes and qualitative turbulence intensity results from an interior plane are shown relative to a bubble trajectory in figure 2(b).

2.2.2. Flow-field and turbulent velocity-scale calculation

For each PIV plane positioned at $y=y_{j}$, the horizontal and vertical components of the water velocity $u_x(x,y_{j},z,t)$ and $u_z(x,y_{j},z,t)$ are computed using ${32}\ \textrm {pix} \times {32}\ \textrm {pix}$ windows with 50 % overlap between adjacent windows, resulting in approximately 1.8 mm between velocity vectors. The mean flow $(\overline {u_x}(x,y_{j},z),\overline {u_z}(x,y_{j},z))$ is calculated by averaging each in time. The turbulent fluctuations $\widehat {u_x}(x,y_{j},z,t)$ and $\widehat {u_z}(x,y_{j},z,t)$ are calculated by subtracting the mean flow from the velocity field, and the root-mean-square fluctuations are calculated with

(2.1)\begin{equation} \left.\begin{gathered} u'_x(x,y_{j},z) = \sqrt{ \overline{\widehat{u_x}(x,y_{j},z,t)^2}} = \sqrt{ \overline{\left(u_x(x,y_j,z,t) - \overline{u_x}(x,y_{j},z) \right)^2}}, \\ u'_z(x,y_{j},z) = \sqrt{ \overline{\widehat{u_z}(x,y_{j},z,t)^2}} = \sqrt{ \overline{\left(u_z(x,y_j,z,t) - \overline{u_z}(x,y_{j},z) \right)^2}}. \end{gathered}\right\} \end{equation}

The mean flow-field and turbulent fluctuations for three of the nine planes are shown in figure 3. The flow is not completely isotropic, as the centrelines of the jets used to create the turbulence all lie in the $x$–$y$ plane. This leads to stronger fluctuations measured in the $x$ direction than the $z$ direction: typically, $u'_x > u'_z$. We approximate the turbulence root-mean-square fluctuation velocity as $u'=\sqrt {({u_x'}^2 + {u_z'}^2)/2}$.

Figure 3.

Summary of PIV results. (a) From left to right, the mean flow, the fluctuations in the $x$ and $z$ directions, and integral length scale in three of the nine PIV planes. (b) The location of the nine PIV planes in the tank. The three coloured ones correspond to the three for which fields are shown above. (c) The integral of the autocorrelation function from which the integral length scale is calculated, at the three points marked by x markers in each field. (d) The structure function at the three marked points. (e) The compensated structure function at the corresponding points. The dashed lines give estimates of the dissipation rate with $0.7 u'^3/L_{int}$.

Additionally, we calculate the longitudinal structure function $D_{LL}(\Delta r)$ at each point in the PIV plane with

(2.2)\begin{align} D_{{LL}}(x,y_{j},z,\Delta r) &= \frac{1}{4} \sum_{i={-}1,+1} \left( \overline{ \left(\widehat{u_x}(x+i\Delta r,y_{j},z,t) - \widehat{u_x}(x,y_{j},z,t)\right)^2 } \right. \nonumber\\ &\quad +\left. \overline{\left(\widehat{u_z}(x,y_{j},z+i\Delta r,t) - \widehat{u_z}(x,y_{j},z,t)\right)^2 } \right), \end{align}

which is shown for a point (marked with an x in the fields in (a)) in three of the PIV planes in figure 3(d). This structure function can be used to calculate the typical turbulent stress at the bubble scale, $\rho D_{LL}(d)/2$. Since each PIV window overlaps with its neighbours by 50 %, our calculation of $D_{LL}(\Delta r)$ will underestimate the true value for values of $\Delta r$ close to the PIV window size, which is approximately 3.7 mm.

Additionally, we estimate the local turbulent dissipation rate using the relation $\epsilon = {0.7} u'^3 / L_{int}$, where $L_{int}$ is the integral length scale of the turbulence (Sreenivasan Reference Sreenivasan1998). This agrees reasonably well with the relation $D_{LL}(\Delta r) = C_2(\epsilon \Delta r)^{2/3}$, with the Kolmogorov constant $C_2 = 2.0$, evaluated by considering the compensated structure function $(D_{LL}/C_2)^{3/2} / \Delta r$ (Pope Reference Pope2000). Figure 3(e) compares these two methods of determining $\epsilon$ at three separate points in the flow field.

Our flow is heterogeneous by nature, due to the regions of high turbulent intensity within the jets and the recirculation patterns that arise around it. As the injected power is constant over the experiments and the experiments are carried out over a long time, it is eventually balanced by dissipation and the turbulent flow is stationary. The spatial heterogeneity allows us to probe a range of turbulent conditions in a single experiment. In Appendix A, we show that in the Lagrangian sense as seen by the bubbles, $u'$ typically changes over a scale not much shorter than the integral time scale of the turbulence. We nevertheless use the standard structure function and relationships used for homogeneous and isotropic turbulence to characterize the intensity and length scale of the flow. Additionally, we show that the velocity gradients of the mean flow are not responsible for the reduction in rise velocity we report. Finally, as the void fraction of bubbles in the turbulence region is negligible, we neglect the bubble feedback onto the turbulent statistics.

2.2.3. Turbulent length scales

Around each measure point of a PIV plane, the integral length scale is computed using the longitudinal autocorrelation function of the velocity fluctuations in the vertical and horizontal directions,

(2.3)\begin{align} \rho_{11}(x,y_j,z,\Delta r) &= \frac{1}{4} \sum_{i={-}1,+1} \left( \frac{\overline{ \widehat{u_{x}}(x,y_{j},z,t) \widehat{u_{x}}(x+i\Delta r,y_{j},z,t)}}{{u'}_x(x,y_j,z)^2} \right. \nonumber\\ &\quad + \left. \frac{\overline{ \widehat{u_{z}}(x,y_{j},z,t) \widehat{u_{z}}(x,y_{j},z+i\Delta r,t)}}{{u'}_z(x,y_j,z)^2} \right). \end{align}

As with the longitudinal structure function (2.2), fewer directions are considered for points near the PIV field boundaries. The integral length scale at a point in the flow is estimated with

(2.4)\begin{equation} L_{int}(x,y_{j},z) = \max \left( \int_0^{\Delta r_{max}} \rho_{11}(x,y_{j},z,\Delta r) \,\textrm{d} \Delta r \right), \end{equation}

which involves the maximum value of the integral instead of its value at $\Delta r_{max}$ since the correlation functions are not completely converged for large distance separation. The fields of $L_{int}$ for three of the nine PIV planes, and the integral in (2.4) for one point in each plane, are shown in figure 3.

The dissipation rate is estimated as $\epsilon (x,y_{j},z) = 0.7 u'^3/L_{int}$ (Sreenivasan Reference Sreenivasan1998), which under the isotropic assumption enables the estimation of the Taylor microscale with

(2.5)\begin{equation} \lambda = \sqrt{15\frac{\nu}{\epsilon}}u', \end{equation}

and the Kolmogorov microscale with $\eta = (\nu ^3 / \epsilon )^{1/4}$.

The turbulence length scales, like the other quantities, vary spatially in the experiments due to the heterogenous nature of the flow. The range of values they take is included in the summary of turbulent conditions given in § 2.2.5. We remind the reader that those have been computed using relationships derived for homogeneous and isotropic turbulent flow, while our flow presents inhomogeneous features, so that they should be considered only as estimates of the turbulence length scales.

Note that we have computed the autocorrelation function to verify the absence of characteristic length scales above the integral length scale. The autocorrelation functions in the various PIV planes decay exponentially above the estimated $L_{int}$ value, which validates the absence of any significant larger characteristic length scales in the flow fluctuations.

2.2.5. Summary of turbulent conditions

Table 1 summarizes the turbulent conditions generated in our experiment. Since the experiment is by design inhomogeneous, we present the 10th, 50th and 90th percentiles of the quantities as sampled by the bubbles, which is determined by the process we describe in the next section.

Table 1.

Distribution of turbulent conditions probed by the bubbles. The 10th, 50th and 90th percentiles of each quantity are given.

2.3. Bubble triangulation and tracking

Bubbles are filmed with two synchronized cameras (Basler acA1440-220um) outfitted with 16 mm lenses, each recording at 200 Hz, as sketched in figure 2. The experiment is back lit with two spot lights shining on translucent paper behind the experiment. For each view, the background is determined by taking the 90th percentile of pixel intensities over whole movie at each pixel location. The background is subtracted from each image, images are binarized using a pixel intensity threshold, the bright regions inside the bubbles are filled in and the projected area (in number of pixels) and image location of each bubble is stored.

3.1. Phenomenological description of three-dimensional displacement of bubble rise through turbulence

To validate the correspondence between the bubble velocities and the water velocity field data, we note that with no horizontal buoyant force exerted on the bubbles, we expect the mean value of the horizontal velocities of bubbles passing through any point to be equal to the mean horizontal velocity of the water at that point. To this end, we compute the joint distribution of the bubble horizontal velocity $w_x(t)$ and the water mean velocity at the bubble locations $\overline {u_x}(\boldsymbol {x}_{b}(t))$ for all the bubble trajectories, which is shown in figure 4(a). The mean horizontal velocities of bubbles passing through regions with each value of $\overline {u_x}(\boldsymbol {x}_{b}(t))$ is shown as the solid red line. Since this line falls on the dashed blue line representing $w_x(t) = \overline {u_x}(\boldsymbol {x}_{b}(t))$, we are confident that the PIV data capture the mean water flow experienced by the bubbles.

Figure 4.

In black and white, the joint distributions of bubble and mean water velocities in the horizontal (a) and vertical (b) directions. Darker regions correspond to a greater number of measurements. The solid line represents the mean velocities of bubbles when they are at a point in the flow with a given mean water velocity. The correspondence between the mean value of $w_x$ and the local value of $\bar {u}_x(\boldsymbol {x}_b)$ shown in (a) suggests the mean bubble horizontal motion aligns with the mean water horizontal motion. The offset between the mean value of $w_z$ and the local value of $\bar {u}_z(\boldsymbol {x}_b)$ shown in (b) suggests that the bubbles typically have a positive vertical velocity relative to the surrounding mean flow.

Similarly, the plot in figure 4(b) compares the vertical velocities of the bubbles $w_z(t)$ to the mean vertical velocity of the water $\overline {u_z}(\boldsymbol {x}_{b}(t))$ at the bubbles’ instantaneous locations. First, we note that bubbles are observed much more often in regions of mean downwards water flow, $\overline {u_z}(\boldsymbol {x}_{b}(t))<0$. This results from the fact that, in the laboratory frame of reference, bubbles linger in regions where the local downwards water velocity is approximately opposite to their slip velocity, which is typically upwards. This effect is accounted for in our analysis through the subtraction of the local mean water velocity from the observed bubble velocities. Secondly, we see that the mean value of a bubble's vertical velocity is greater than the local value of the mean vertical water velocity: the bubbles rise through the turbulence.

Figure 5(a) shows the path one bubble takes as it rises through the turbulence. The trajectory begins at the bottom of the region shown. As the bubble rises due to gravity, its path is altered due both to the surrounding turbulent fluctuations and the structure of the mean flow induced in our experiment. The turbulence is responsible for the small-scale deviations in the trajectory, while the large-scale ‘loop’ performed by the bubble results from its advection into a region of strong downwards mean flow.

Figure 5.

Experimental data for one bubble rising in turbulence. (a) The trajectory taken by the bubble rising through turbulence. (b) For the portion of the trajectory inside the region resolved with PIV, the bubble's absolute horizontal velocity $u_{b}(t)$, the local mean horizontal water velocity at the bubble's location $\overline {u_x}(\boldsymbol {x}_{b}(t))$ and the bubble's relative rise velocity, which is the difference between the two. (c) The corresponding vertical velocities.

The horizontal and vertical components of the bubble's velocity in the laboratory frame, $w_x(t)$ and $w_z(t)$, are shown for a small portion of its trajectory as the black curves in figures 5(b) and 5(c). To account for the mean velocity in the water induced by the forcing, we interpolate the local mean water velocity at each position $\overline {u_x}(\boldsymbol {x}_{b}(t))$ and $\overline {u_z}(\boldsymbol {x}_{b}(t))$, shown as the dashed grey lines in (b,c), and subtract them from $w_x(t)$ and $w_z(t)$ to compute the bubble's relative velocity through the turbulence,

(3.1a,b)\begin{equation} v_x = w_x - \overline{u_x}, \quad v_z = w_z - \overline{u_z}, \end{equation}

which are shown as the red curves. With the mean water velocity subtracted, the velocities $v_x$ and $v_z$ represent the motion of the bubbles due to the turbulent fluctuations.

This subtraction of the continuous phase mean velocity extends the analysis performed with counter-flow water channels (Mathai et al. Reference Mathai, Huisman, Sun, Lohse and Bourgoin2018; Salibindla et al. Reference Salibindla, Masuk, Tan and Ni2020), since we subtract a spatially varying mean flow. This appears critical when considering heterogeneous turbulent flow to isolate the effect of the turbulent fluctuations by removing the effect of the mean flow. As is shown in Appendix A.1, the time scales of the Lagrangian change in the turbulence statistics for the bubbles in our heterogeneous flow are typically not significantly shorter than than the relevant time scales of the turbulence, and they are much longer than the characteristic time scales of the bubble dynamics. This means that the advection of a bubble through regions of varying turbulence intensity happens slowly enough that the bubble has time to adapt to its new turbulent surroundings. In the end, the large-scale heterogeneity of the turbulence and our mean-subtraction technique enable us to explore a wide range of the problem's parameter space, as we bin measurements by the local turbulent characteristics, similar to the method employed by Vejražka, Zedníková & Stanovský (Reference Vejražka, Zedníková and Stanovský2018) when analysing bubble break-up.

3.2. Probability distribution of bubble velocities

The distribution of the bubbles’ velocities is shown in figure 6 as a function of the bubble size and local velocity fluctuation scale in the turbulence. Distributions of horizontal velocity are shown in (a,b,c), and distributions of vertical velocity are shown in (d,e,f). The sizes of the bubbles considered increases from left to right. Dashed lines give the distributions of the absolute bubble velocities in the laboratory frame, $\boldsymbol {w}$, while solid lines give the distributions of velocities relative to the local mean water flow, $\boldsymbol {v}$.

Figure 6.

The probability distributions of the bubbles’ horizontal (a–c) and vertical (d–f) velocities, for small (a,d), medium (b,e) and large (c,f) bubbles, in regions of various $u'$. Dashed lines show the distribution of the bubbles’ absolute velocities $w_x$ and $w_z$, without the local mean water flow subtracted. Solid lines show the distributions of bubble relative velocity relative to the mean flow, $v_x$ and $v_z$, which are the bubble velocity quantities considered in the rest of this paper. The horizontal velocity distributions are symmetric and centred around zero while the distributions of $v_z$ are skewed and centred around a non-zero value smaller than the rise speed in quiescent water. The distributions appear broader at high turbulence strength for both velocity components.

At larger values of $u'$, with $u'$ denoted by the line colour, the standard deviation of both horizontal and vertical bubble velocities increases. At the same time, larger values of $u'$ lead to a decreased mean rise speed, evident in the leftwards shift of distributions of $v_z$ with increasing $u'$.

Without subtracting the mean water flow, the absolute vertical velocities of the bubbles $w_z$ (shown as dashed lines) are shifted to the left, owing to the large downwards flow out of the turbulent region. The magnitude of this shift increases with $u'$ due to the turbulence generation method we employ: regions of strongest turbulence in our set-up also have the largest mean flow. The distributions of the horizontal velocities are symmetric, while the distributions of vertical velocities have strong negative tails.

Figure 7 shows the same data, with distributions shifted by their mean to show the velocity fluctuations and normalized by their standard deviations. Bubble sizes are now parameterized by $d^*=d/L_{int}$, which gives their diameter relative to the integral length scale of the turbulence, and the turbulence intensity is now binned by $\beta =u'/v_{q}$, which is the ratio of the turbulence fluctuation velocity to the bubble's quiescent rise speed, as determined by the method presented in the next section.

Figure 7.

The probability distributions of the bubbles’ horizontal (a–c) and vertical (d–f) velocity fluctuations, normalized by their standard deviation, for small (a,d), medium (b,e) and large (c,f) bubbles, in regions of various $u'$. Dashed lines show the distribution of the bubbles’ absolute velocities $w_x$ and $w_z$, without the local mean water flow subtracted. Solid lines show the distributions of velocity relative to the mean flow $v_x$ and $v_z$, which is the quantity considered in the rest of this paper. The skewness of the $v_z$ distributions ranges from $-0.96$ to $-1.04$ for $\beta \approx 0.22$, from $-0.31$ to $-0.47$ for $\beta \approx 0.45$ and from $-0.01$ to $-0.14$ for $\beta \approx 0.68$.

The distributions of bubble horizontal velocity $v_x$, shown in (a,b,c), are well described by Gaussians over a range of bubble sizes and turbulence intensities. The distributions of vertical velocity $v_z$, however, exhibit large negative tails, especially in weaker turbulence, suggesting an up–down anisotropy in the bubbles’ motions. The skewness values $\langle ( (v_z - \left \langle v_z \right \rangle ) / v_z')^3 \rangle$ (with $v_z' = \sqrt {\langle (v_z - \left \langle v_z \right \rangle )^2 \rangle }$ the standard deviation of vertical velocity) for the vertical velocity distributions are given in the figure caption, showing significant negative skewness for small $\beta$.

Overall, the rise velocity distributions approach Gaussian distributions at large $u'$, and are reasonably well described by their mean value and standard deviation (r.m.s. fluctuations), except for $v_z$ at small $\beta$. This justifies our use of the first two moments of the velocity distributions to describe their statistics in the rest of this paper.

3.3. Average rise velocity and bubble vertical velocity fluctuations

After having discussed distribution of the velocities of bubbles rising through turbulence, we now show in figure 8(a) that the turbulence slows the bubbles’ mean rise rates $\left \langle v_z \right \rangle$, and does so to a greater extent when the turbulence is stronger.

Figure 8.

Experimental statistics of the motion of bubbles of various sizes in regions of turbulence of various intensities. (a) The mean rise speed of bubbles as a function of the bubble diameter $d$, binned by the local value of the vertical fluctuations in the turbulence $u'$. The dashed line shows the rise velocity of a clean bubble in a quiescent flow (Park et al. Reference Park, Park, Lee and Lee2017), the dash-dotted line shows the rise velocity of a contaminated bubble in a quiescent flow (Clift et al. Reference Clift, Grace and Weber1978) and the solid grey line shows the inferred rise rates at $u'=0$. Dotted lines show data from our second experiment. Bubbles are slowed down (relative to the quiescent case) by the turbulence, and this slowdown is more pronounced as the turbulence increases. For the main experiment, each bin is comprised of approximately $45\ \textrm {bubble}-\textrm {seconds}$ of bubble observations, corresponding to approximately 250 large-scale eddy turnover times, on average. (b) The standard deviation of the bubbles’ vertical velocities.

We bin the measurements of bubble rise velocity in turbulence $v_z$ by the local turbulent fluctuations in the water $u'$ and the bubble size $d$, and present the corresponding rise speed curves (the mean value of $v_z$ in each bin) as the solid coloured lines. Each point, then, represents the average of all measurements of bubbles with diameter approximately $d$ in regions with turbulent fluctuations approximately $u'$. For all intensities of the turbulence, the average bubble rise speed increases with the bubble size. Increasing values of $u'$ reduce the mean bubble rise speed. Data from our second experiment, described in Appendix B, are shown as the coloured dotted lines. The good agreement between the two datasets shows that our results are not dependent on the specificity of the large-scale mean flow.

As a point of comparison, the dashed curve shows a parameterization of the rise speed of air bubbles in clean, quiescent water from Park et al. (Reference Park, Park, Lee and Lee2017), and the dash-dotted line shows the corresponding curve for dirty water from Clift et al. (Reference Clift, Grace and Weber1978), given by

(3.2)\begin{equation} v_{q} = \frac{\nu}{d} {M}^{{-}0.149} (J - 0.857), \end{equation}

where the Morton number is ${M} = g \mu ^4 (\rho - \rho _{p}) / (\rho ^2 \sigma ^3) \approx g \mu ^4 / (\rho \sigma ^3)$, and the value of $J$ is given by

(3.3)\begin{equation} \left.\begin{gathered} J = 0.94 H^{0.757}, \quad 2 < H \leqslant 59.3,\\ J = 3.42 H^{0.441}, \quad H > 59.3, \end{gathered}\right\} \end{equation}

with $H= (4/3) {Bo}\, {M}^{-0.149} (\mu / \mu _{ref})^{-0.14}$, where $\mu _{ref}$ is a reference liquid viscosity of $9\times 10^{-4}\ \textrm {kg}\ \textrm {m}\ \textrm {s}^{-1}$. The change in behaviour at $H=59.3$ corresponds to the development of oscillations in the bubble path (Clift et al. Reference Clift, Grace and Weber1978). We note that other parameterizations for rise velocity in contaminated water exist in the literature (Thorpe Reference Thorpe1982).

Additionally, in figure 8(b) we show the standard deviation of the bubbles’ vertical velocities, using the same binning technique. As already discussed, the standard deviation of the bubble velocity increases with the turbulence fluctuations $u'$. At any intensity of the turbulence, the standard deviation in bubble velocity is smaller for larger bubbles. At lower values of $u'$, the vertical velocity standard deviation for smaller bubbles is significantly higher than $u'$, but the size dependence disappears in regions of more intense turbulence.

3.4. Inference of rise speed at $\beta \ll 1$

We evaluate the rise velocity at low turbulence and compare it to results from the literature for quiescent water. The weakest turbulence we probe experimentally has $u' \approx 0.03\ \textrm {m}\ \textrm {s}^{-1}$, so we extrapolate the average rise velocity to $u'=0$, denoted $v_{z,0}(d)$, with a linear fit to $\left \langle v_z \right \rangle (u')$ for each bubble diameter. This is sketched for three bins of $d$ in figure 9(a). The choice of bounds in $u'$ for this linear fit (between ${0.03}\ \textrm {m}\ \textrm {s}^{-1}$ and ${0.08}\ \textrm {m}\ \textrm {s}^{-1}$) is somewhat arbitrary, but provides a good balance between (a) providing a sufficient amount of data for each fit and (b) spanning a range in which the $\left \langle v_z \right \rangle$ and $u'$ relation is approximately linear. Using this extrapolation technique to calculate the speed from which to measure the reduction in rise velocity accounts for modifications to the flow field around the bubble in turbulence, which may render the quiescent rise velocity curve a physically irrelevant comparison.

Figure 9.

The effect of the turbulent fluctuations on the bubble's rise velocity. (a) The rise speed of bubbles as a function of the turbulence intensity for various size classes of bubbles, shown as solid lines. The dotted line gives the corresponding data from our second experiment for the smallest size class of bubbles. The linear fits to each trend for $0.03\ \textrm {m}\ \textrm {s}^{-1} \leqslant u' \leqslant 0.08\ \textrm {m}\ \textrm {s}^{-1}$ are shown as dashed lines, and the solid circles represent the inferred rise velocity at $u' = 0$. (b,c) The effective quiescent drag coefficient $C_{{D},0}$ associated with the extrapolated rise speed at $u'=0$, plotted as a a function of the associated Reynolds and Bond numbers. Dashed and dashed-dotted curves give the relations for clean and contaminated bubbles, respectively, in quiescent flow, from Clift et al. (Reference Clift, Grace and Weber1978) and Park et al. (Reference Park, Park, Lee and Lee2017).

The resulting $v_{z,0}(d)$ curve is shown in figure 8(a) as the solid grey line. We observe that it is relatively close to the rise velocity for contaminated bubbles in quiescence described by Clift et al. (Reference Clift, Grace and Weber1978), (3.2). In the following, we will employ this correlation in calculating $v_{q}$ for our experimental data. Figure 9(b,c) shows the same data, expressed as an effective drag coefficient $C_{{D},0}$ calculated with

(3.4)\begin{equation} \frac{4 {\rm \pi}}{3} \left( \frac{d}{2} \right)^3 \rho g = C_{{D},0} \frac{\rm \pi}{2} \left( \frac{d}{2} \right)^2 \rho v_{z,0}^2 \end{equation}

and plotted against the Reynolds and Bond numbers. The rise velocity curve in clean water presents a behaviour significantly different from the extrapolated values at $u'=0$. The discrepancy may have several physical origins. First, the experiments were carried out with a vessel open to the ambient air on top, so the water may have been significantly contaminated. Another justification for the use of the quiescent, contaminated rise velocity is that it removes the maximum of rise speed for bubbles near $d={2}\ \textrm {mm}$, for which wake instabilities can significantly increase the rise speed. In the presence of a turbulent flow even of small intensity compared with the rise speed, the wake instabilities may have been inhibited.

To summarize, our inferred rise velocity at very low turbulence is close to the rise velocity of bubbles with contaminated surfaces in quiescence, taken from Clift et al. (Reference Clift, Grace and Weber1978). We will use this parameterization as an appropriate baseline in computing the reduction in rise velocity due to the turbulence.

3.5. Dimensionless rise velocity

Next, we use our experimental data to compute the average non-dimensional rise velocity of bubbles in turbulence, $\left \langle v_z \right \rangle (d,u')/v_{q}(d)$. Figure 8 suggests that $\left \langle v_z \right \rangle \propto 1/u'$, together with some $d$ scaling, so that we consider $\left \langle v_z \right \rangle /v_{q}$ as a function of the bubble Froude number ${Fr} = u'/\sqrt {dg} = \beta / \sqrt {3 C_{{D},0} / 4}$ in figure 10 for various values of $d^*=d/L_{int}$.

Figure 10.

The non-dimensional rise speed, binned by the size of the bubble in relation to the turbulent integral length scale $d^*=d/L_{int}$, with the non-dimensional rise velocity $\left \langle v_z \right \rangle /v_{q}$ plotted against the non-dimensional intensity of the turbulence $u'/\sqrt {dg}$. Solid lines show data from our main experiment; the dotted line shows data from our second experimental set-up. The thicker line in the background shows $\left \langle v_z \right \rangle /v_{q} = c/{\textit {Fr}}$, with $c=0.37$ an adjusted non-dimensional coefficient.

For all bubble sizes, bubbles in weak turbulence (${\textit {Fr}} \approx 0.25$ in our experiments) have a dimensionless average rise velocity reduced by a small factor, and we would expect $\left \langle v_z \right \rangle \rightarrow v_{q}$ for ${\textit {Fr}} {\rightarrow 0}$. As the turbulence is increased, the dimensionless average rise velocity decreases. Moreover, bubbles of all sizes (with $d^*$ from 0.07 to 0.4, so that all bubbles considered are within the inertial range of the turbulence) behave in the same way. The data collapse for various $d^*$, and at larger ${\textit {Fr}}$ scale as

(3.5)\begin{equation} \left \langle v_z \right \rangle/v_{q} = c / {\textit{Fr}}, \end{equation}

with $c$ a non-dimensional coefficient fitted to the data, $c=0.37$. As will be discussed in the following section, this scaling will also be observed in point-bubble simulations, and will be justified with a theoretical model based on the role of the nonlinear drag and large-scale fluctuations in reducing the bubbles' rise velocity. This scaling and collapse in $d^*$ is also supported by the results from our second experiment, which are shown as the dotted green line. This experiment involved smaller bubbles and a shorter typical integral length scale, leading to larger values of $d^*$.

4.1. Simulation methodology

We employ the DNS of HIT publicly available on the Johns Hopkins Turbulence Database (Perlman et al. Reference Perlman, Burns, Li and Meneveau2007; Li et al. Reference Li, Perlman, Wan, Yang, Meneveau, Burns, Chen, Szalay and Eyink2008). The turbulence, generated by a random forcing in Fourier space, is described by the time-averaged Taylor-scale Reynolds number ${Re}_\lambda = u' \lambda / \nu = 418$ and large-scale Reynolds number ${Re}_{t} = u' L_{int} / \nu = 5060$, and is simulated on a $1024^3$ periodic grid spanning $L_{DNS} = 4.6 L_{int} = 2200 \eta$ in all three directions. For each condition simulated, $n_{b} = 500$ to 2500 point bubbles are positioned randomly in the domain.

Their position in time is advanced with (1.9), the Maxey–Riley equation simplified for a bubble in a much denser liquid. In total, this presents four initial dimensionless parameters: $C_{M}$, $C_{L}$, $\beta$ and $d^*$. The turbulence characteristics are fixed with a single DNS simulation; therefore, we do not study any turbulent Reynolds number effects, but will compare with experimental results.

Numerically, (1.9) is integrated using a forward Euler scheme, with the velocity of bubble $i$ at timestep $t+1$ written as $\boldsymbol {v}_i^{t+1} = \boldsymbol {v}_i^{t} + f(\boldsymbol {v}_i^t,\boldsymbol {u}(\boldsymbol {x}_i^t)) \Delta t$, with $x_i^{t+1} = x_i^t + v_i^t \Delta t$ the bubble position. The orientation of the coordinate system is chosen randomly for each bubble by picking an arbitrary direction for gravity with respect to the DNS; $\boldsymbol {e}_z$ is then defined to be anti-parallel to this direction. The timestep $\Delta t$ for most simulations is 5 times that used in the original DNS of the turbulence, giving $\Delta t \approx \tau _\eta / 40$. The integration was run with twice or half this value of $\Delta t$ for one case to ensure that results were converged with respect to $\Delta t$. Python code for the integration of the equation of motion is available at https://github.com/DeikeLab/point-particles-in-a-flow.

In all the simulations, we consider $C_{M}=0.5$, the value for a solid sphere (Magnaudet & Eames Reference Magnaudet and Eames2000). As the lift coefficient is not yet well defined for deformable bubbles in turbulence, we initially vary its value between $-0.25$ and $0.25$ to assess its influence (Magnaudet & Eames Reference Magnaudet and Eames2000; Salibindla et al. Reference Salibindla, Masuk, Tan and Ni2020), and later fix $C_{L}=0$ as we observe the lift force does not have a strong impact on the results. Finally, we fix $C_{D}=1$, prescribing a constant ratio between $\beta$ and ${\textit {Fr}}$ for the point bubbles ($\beta /{\textit {Fr}} = \sqrt {3 C_{D} / 4} \approx 0.87$). The use of a mean drag coefficient is questionable in particular because the instantaneous particle Reynolds number ${Re}_{p} = |\boldsymbol {v}-\boldsymbol {u}|d/\nu$ can vary significantly with time. Section 5.4 investigates the effect of a variable drag coefficient by computing ${Re}_{p}$ at each timestep, and then setting the drag coefficient accordingly following Snyder et al. (Reference Snyder, Knio, Katz and Le Maître2007). Figure 11 shows the $({\textit {Fr}}=u'/\sqrt {dg}, d^*=d/L_{int})$ parameter space of the experiments and the point-bubble simulations, the latter of which were all carried out at $d^*=0.12$. In the rest of the paper, we will focus on the role of ${Fr}$ in setting the rise velocity.

Figure 11.

The simulation conditions. (a) The relation between ${Fr}$ and $d^*$. The joint probability density function (p.d.f.) of experimentally sampled conditions is shaded in the background. Orange markers denote the conditions simulated and discussed later in this paper. (b) A simulated three-dimensional bubble trajectory. (c) The vertical components of the bubble's velocity $\boldsymbol {v}$ (red) and the instantaneous fluid velocity at the bubble's location $\boldsymbol {u}$ (black). Times are normalized by the Eulerian integral time scale of the turbulence $L_{int}/u'$. The inset focuses on a region lasting approximately $0.4 L_{int}/u'$, and includes a horizontal black bar denoting the Kolmogorov time scale $t_\eta$.

First, to gain a qualitative insight into the bubble's interaction with the turbulence, we consider the simulations with two values of $\beta$ (or Fr) depicted in figure 12. In each snapshot, the size of the field of view is proportional to the bubble size, and the carrier velocity field $\boldsymbol {u}$ is scaled by the quiescent rise velocity. The two panels, then, represent the same view of two bubbles, each of the same size and existing under the same gravitational acceleration (and therefore with the same $v_{q}$), but rising through turbulence fields with differing $u'$ (but the same $L_{int}$ and ${Re}_{t}$).

Figure 12.

Snapshots of the carrier fluid velocity field in the $x$–$z$ plane coincident with the point bubble, normalized by $v_{q}$, (red background) and bubble trajectory (black lines) for two values of $\beta$ with $d^*=0.1$. The images are scaled such that the bubble size $d$ and gravitational acceleration $g$ can be treated as constant in both scenarios, while $u'$ varies to modify $\beta$. $C_{D}=1$ is used to prescribe the size of the point bubble in the image.

The magnitude of the turbulent velocity fluctuations in the carrier fluid increases with $\beta$: the right snapshot, with $\beta =0.75$, presents a wider range of $|\boldsymbol {u}|$ than the left snapshot, with $\beta =0.25$. The bubble trajectories, too, exhibit markedly different characteristics. For the weakest turbulence case shown in the left, the bubble quickly passes through the fixed field of view, gradually curving in one direction but largely unaffected by the surrounding turbulence. When the velocity scale of the turbulence is larger, the bubble's trajectory exhibits tighter curvatures and takes on a more chaotic path. We will see that this is due to a relative increase of slip velocity compared with the mean rise velocity.

4.2. Comparison to experimentally measured velocities

We consider simulations run with $d^*=0.12$, which is a typical value realized in the experiments (see figure 11). For now, we omit the lift force by setting $C_{L}=0$, but will later show it has only a small impact on the point-bubble average rise velocity. Figure 13 shows, for two values of $\beta$, the distributions of the normalized bubble vertical velocity $v_{z}/v_{q}$ as the solid red lines. The distribution of experimentally measured vertical bubble velocities for bubbles at similar conditions (considering $\beta$ within 0.1 and $d^*$ within 0.04 of the given values) are shown with the solid black lines, without any adjustable parameters. The experimental and numerical probability distribution functions show similar shapes, while experimental results present a slightly higher skewness, especially at low $\beta$. However, the general quantitative agreement in terms of the mean velocities and widths displayed by the p.d.f.s is very encouraging. The differences between the two can be attributed in part to the binning procedure used in selecting which experimentally measured points to include in the distribution, while the simulation involves a single, well-defined condition.

Figure 13.

Experimentally measured (black) and simulated (red) velocity distributions for bubbles in turbulence. Red lines show distributions from the point-bubble simulation with $\beta =0.5$ (a) or $\beta =1$ (b), with $d^*= 0.12$ and $C_{L}=0$. The corresponding values of ${\textit {Fr}}$ are 0.58 and 1.15. Black lines show the experimental measurements considering $\beta$ within 0.1 of the given value, and $d^*$ within 0.04 of $d^*=0.12$. Both the experimental and simulated distributions of the Eulerian fluid velocity are approximately Gaussian, and the measured distribution of bubble vertical velocities matches the shape of the simulated point-bubble vertical velocities.

Additionally, we show the simulated Eulerian distribution of carrier-phase velocity, $u_z/v_{q}$, as the dotted red lines. This is created by randomly sampling the DNS at many locations and points in time. The analogous distribution from the experiments is obtained from the PIV results. While a slight up–down anisotropy is present in our experiment, the velocity p.d.f.s in the experiment and simulations are similar.

From the numerical simulations, we now have access to the statistics of the instantaneous liquid velocity at the bubble's location. Figure 14 shows the simulated distributions of the vertical and horizontal components of $\boldsymbol {v}$, $\boldsymbol {u}$ (as sampled by the bubbles) and $\boldsymbol {v}-\boldsymbol {u}$ (each normalized by $u'$) for point bubbles at various $\beta$ and $d^*=0.12$. In weaker turbulence ($\beta =0.5$), the vertical slip $v_z-u_z$ (dashed lines) follows a more narrow distribution centred near $v_{q}$, but with a larger negative tail: the bubbles are typically rising through the carrier fluid with a relative velocity comparable to their quiescent rise velocity, but are slipping at lesser vertical velocities more often than they are at greater vertical velocities. The vertical fluid velocity the bubble samples $u_z$ (dash-dotted lines) has a distribution close to that of the Eulerian velocity field, centred near 0 with a dimensionless standard deviation of $u_z/u' \approx 1$. The bubbles’ absolute vertical velocity (solid lines), then, is centred near but below $v_{q}$, with a spread comparable to the spread in $u_z$.

Figure 14.

Simulated vertical (a–c) and horizontal (d–f) velocity distributions for bubbles at various ${\textit {Fr}}$ (columns), all normalized by $u'$. The distributions of normalized bubble velocity $v_i/u'$ are shown as the solid lines; the distributions of Lagrangian normalized carrier fluid velocity sampled by the bubbles $u_i/u'$ are shown as the dashed-dotted lines; and the distributions of bubble normalized slip velocity $(v_i-u_i)/u'$ are shown as the dashed lines, exhibiting exponential tails. The thicker orange curve in the background gives the Gaussian distribution corresponding to the mean and standard deviation of the bubble normalized velocity $v_i/u'$. The skewness of the distributions of $v_z$ are $-0.29$ for $\beta = 0.5$, $-0.02$ for $\beta = 1$ and 0.02 for $\beta =3$.

As $\beta$ increases, the distribution of vertical fluid velocities $u_z$ sampled remains near Gaussian, with the standard deviation of $u_z/u' \approx 1$. Since the distributions of the vertical slip velocity $v_z - u_z$ are centred at or near $v_{q}$, this increased spread in $u_z$ increases the spread in the bubble's absolute vertical velocity, $v_z$. The distributions of the bubble's vertical slip velocity are asymmetric, in that fast upwards fluctuations are less likely than fast downwards fluctuations. As with the distributions of experimentally measured vertical velocities shown in figure 7, the skewness (reported in the caption) is more negative for smaller $\beta$ than for larger $\beta$. The spread in $v_z-u_z$ increases when $d^*$ increases.

The horizontal velocity distributions, when normalized by $u'$, do not vary much with $\beta$ and are mostly Gaussian. The horizontal slip velocity also presents exponential tails, but is now centred on 0 for all values of $\beta$.

Having analysed the distributions of the bubble velocities and the fluid velocities they sample, we now consider the mean velocities with which they rise through the turbulence, $\left \langle v_z \right \rangle$, which are shown alongside experimental data in figure 15. We vary ${\textit {Fr}}$ between 0.1 and 3.5 in our point-bubble simulations, and to assess the impact of the lift force, we consider $C_{L} = -0.25$, 0 and 0.25 with $d^*=0.12$. The mean rise speed, normalized by the quiescent rise speed, is shown in figure 15(a), plotted as a function of ${\textit {Fr}}$. The value of the lift coefficient has a negligible impact on the mean rise speed.

Figure 15.

Experimental (solid coloured lines, binned by $d^*$) and simulation results (at $d^*=0.12$). Points denote the dimensionless rise speed of the bubbles, for $C_{L}=-0.25$ (dash-dotted black line), $C_{L}=0$ (solid black line) and $C_{L}=0.25$ (dashed black line). Solid coloured lines (and the single dotted line from the second experiment) show the experimental results for different values of $d^*$. (a) The dimensionless rise speed plotted against the Froude number. The thicker orange line represents the $\left \langle v_z \right \rangle / v_{q} =0.37/{\textit {Fr}}$ scaling. (b,c) The standard deviations of the horizontal and vertical bubble velocity fluctuations, respectively, normalized by $u'$.

We note that the values we consider for the lift coefficient are consistent with the ones reported by Salibindla et al. (Reference Salibindla, Masuk, Tan and Ni2020) in a turbulent flow. The negligible effect of the lift force within the Maxey–Riley framework is consistent with the work from Snyder et al. (Reference Snyder, Knio, Katz and Le Maître2007), who employed a more detailed lift coefficient that is dependent on the instantaneous local flow. The agreement between our experimental data and point-bubble simulations suggests that for the range of Weber number we consider (typically less than 1), the deformation is small enough so that the lift force will not have a significant effect. A detailed numerical study of the lift force effects would indeed require a much more sophisticated modelling approach.

To conclude, the numerical results are in good agreement with the collapse of the experimental data, which are shown again here for comparison. This confirms the experimentally observed scaling, $\left \langle v_z \right \rangle / v_{q} \propto 1/{\textit {Fr}}$, valid for ${\textit {Fr}}\geqslant 0.4$, while a quadratic scaling for the decrease in rise velocity at low Froude number could represent the numerical data.

Figure 15(b,c) shows the standard deviation of the bubble horizontal and vertical velocities, respectively, as functions of the Froude number. In the point-bubble simulations, both components are near $u'$. In the experimental data, bubbles at smaller ${\textit {Fr}}$ exhibit slightly greater velocity fluctuations than the turbulence, which might be attributed to bubble oscillations and deformability. Simulation results from Spelt & Biesheuvel (Reference Spelt and Biesheuvel1997) also indicate $v_z'/u'>1$ for bubbles at intermediate $\beta$ (which in their case are subjected to viscous drag), as did experiments from Mathai et al. (Reference Mathai, Huisman, Sun, Lohse and Bourgoin2018) at low $\beta$ (attributed to the bubble oscillations), although we leave open the possibility that our results are influenced by the heterogeneity of our experiment, which may cause bubbles to ‘carry’ with them large fluctuation velocities as they leave regions of large $u'$ and enter regions of lower $u'$. However, for ${\textit {Fr}} > 0.5$, our results indicate that the bubble velocity fluctuations can be attributed to the turbulent flow in which they are submersed.

4.3. Forces acting on the bubble

The mean values of the vertical component of the lift, drag and pressure forces acting on the point bubbles, each normalized by the vertical component of the buoyancy force $F_{{buoyancy},z}={\rm \pi} \rho d^3 g/6$, are shown in figure 16(a). The forces are sketched for a bubble in a representative flow field in figure 16(b). At low values of ${\textit {Fr}}$, gravity is balanced by the drag force, and the lift and pressure forces are insignificant. (Without any turbulence, when ${\textit {Fr}}=0$, only the drag force is present in (1.9) to counteract buoyancy.) As ${\textit {Fr}}$ increases, the pressure term becomes significant, and in the $C_{L} \neq 0$ cases, the mean vertical lift force grows in magnitude. This mean lift force is upwards for $C_{L}=0.25$ and downwards for $C_{L}=-0.25$. Even though the lift force acts upwards on average in the $C_{L}=0.25$ case, it causes bubbles to be slowed to an even greater extent, due to its effect on the preferential sampling of the flow by the bubbles.

Figure 16.

Forces acting on the bubble for $d^*=0.12$. (a) The mean value of the vertical component of each force acting on the bubble at each condition, normalized by the gravitational force, for the constant $d^*$ cases shown in figure 15. Dash-dotted blue lines correspond to simulations with $C_{L}=-0.25$, solid black lines to $C_{L}=0$ and dashed red lines to $C_{L}=0.25$. (b) A sketch of a bubble (white) moving through a carrier fluid whose speed is shown in the image background. The instantaneous buoyant (green), lift (brown), drag (orange) and pressure (purple) forces acting on the bubble according to $\boldsymbol {v}$ and $\boldsymbol {u}$ are sketched.

An important result of these simulations is that, even though the turbulence through which the bubbles rise is homogeneous and isotropic, the pressure term $(1+C_{M}) \rho ({\rm \pi} d^3 / 6) \,\mathrm {D} \boldsymbol {u} / \mathrm {D} t$ does not average to $\boldsymbol {0}$ over a bubble's trajectory. Instead, we see $\left \langle (\mathrm {D} \boldsymbol {u} / \mathrm {D} t)_z \right \rangle < 0$, meaning that it acts on average in the downwards direction, due to the bubbles’ preferential sampling of the flow. At larger $\beta$, this term plays a significant role in slowing the bubble down. Further, the means of the vertical drag and pressure forces display similar trends with or without the lift force present, and for ${\textit {Fr}}>1$, the ratio between drag and pressure forces appears constant.

Along with considering the mean values of forces acting on the bubbles, we can consider the mean values of the vertical fluid velocity sampled by the bubble $\left \langle u_{z} \right \rangle$, the mean vertical slip velocity $\left \langle v_z - u_z \right \rangle$, the mean magnitude of the entire slip velocity $\left \langle |\boldsymbol {v} - \boldsymbol {u}| \right \rangle$, and the mean magnitude of the fluctuation component of the slip velocity $\left \langle |\boldsymbol {v}' - \boldsymbol {u}'| \right \rangle$, which are shown in figure 17, each normalized by $v_{q}$. The mean value of the vertical fluid velocity sampled by the bubbles $\left \langle u_z \right \rangle$, shown in blue, is typically slightly less than zero, but for higher ${\textit {Fr}}$, the mean slip velocity $\left \langle v_z-u_z \right \rangle$ is drastically decreased relative to the quiescent case, in which $v_z/v_{q}=1$. This reveals that the primary cause of the slowdown in rise velocity due to the turbulence is not the preferential sampling of $u_z<0$ regions, but is instead a decreased vertical slip velocity. Finally, at low values of ${\textit {Fr}}$, the magnitude of the slip velocity is given by the quiescent rise velocity, but at larger ${\textit {Fr}}$, it is dominated by the fluctuations in the slip velocity $\boldsymbol {v}'-\boldsymbol {u}'$. The typical magnitude of this slip scales linearly with $u'$. This presents an anisotropy in the mean slip velocity $\left \langle \boldsymbol {v}-\boldsymbol {u} \right \rangle$: at low ${\textit {Fr}}$, we have $\left \langle \boldsymbol {v}-\boldsymbol {u} \right \rangle \approx v_{q} \boldsymbol {e}_z$ (which is nearly $\left \langle v_z \right \rangle \boldsymbol {e}_z$ for such conditions), while at large ${\textit {Fr}}$, we have ${\left \langle \boldsymbol {v}-\boldsymbol {u} \right \rangle } \approx \boldsymbol {0}$ and $\left \langle |\boldsymbol {v}-\boldsymbol {u}| \right \rangle \approx u'$.

Figure 17.

The mean value of the vertical fluid velocity $u_z$, vertical slip velocity $v_z-u_z$, slip velocity magnitude $|\boldsymbol {v} - \boldsymbol {u}|$ and slip velocity fluctuation magnitude $|\boldsymbol {v}' - \boldsymbol {u}'|$, for point-bubble simulations with $d^*=0.12$. The mean vertical slip velocity $\left \langle v_z - u_z \right \rangle$ decreases to a much greater extent than that to which the bubble over-samples regions of $u_z < 0$. At low ${Fr}$, the magnitude of the slip velocity $|\boldsymbol {v}-\boldsymbol {u}|$ is dominated by the bubble's mean vertical slip $\left \langle v_z - u_z \right \rangle$, but at higher ${\textit {Fr}}$, becomes dominated by the fluctuations in the slip velocity $\boldsymbol {v}' - \boldsymbol {u}'$. The dashed black line gives a linear fit to $\left \langle |\boldsymbol {v}'-\boldsymbol {u}'| \right \rangle /v_{q}$ for $\beta \geqslant 0.5$.

5.1. Case of $\beta \ll 1$: $v_0 \gg |{\boldsymbol {v}}-{\boldsymbol {u}}|$

In the $\beta \ll 1$ limit, we expect the rise velocity to be only slightly perturbed by the presence of the background flow. In that regime, using $v_0 \gg |\boldsymbol {v}'-\boldsymbol {u}'|$, we have $|\boldsymbol {v}-\boldsymbol {u}| \approx v_0(1+({|\boldsymbol {v}'-\boldsymbol {u}'|^2})/{(2 v_0^2)})$ and, neglecting the convective term in (5.4) ($\beta \ll 1$), we obtain

(5.7)\begin{equation} \left \langle |\boldsymbol{v}-\boldsymbol{u}|(v_z - u_z) \right \rangle = v_0 \left( v_0 + \frac{\left \langle |\boldsymbol{v}'-\boldsymbol{u}'|^2 \right \rangle}{2 v_0} \right ) = \frac{1}{\beta^2}, \end{equation}

which yields $v_0 = \sqrt {{1}/{\beta ^2} - \left \langle |\boldsymbol {v}'-\boldsymbol {u}'|^2 \right \rangle /{2}}$.

Using $\left \langle |\boldsymbol {v}'-\boldsymbol {u}'| \right \rangle = \chi u'$ (which can be justified by figure 17), and recalling that with dimensions for $\left \langle v_z \right \rangle$ and $u'$ we have $v_0=\left \langle v_z \right \rangle /u'$, $\beta =u'/v_{q}$, we have the following dimensional result:

(5.8)\begin{equation} \left \langle v_z \right \rangle = v_{q} \left ( 1 - \frac{\chi}{4} \frac{u'^2}{v_{q}^2} \right). \end{equation}

This result is consistent with our numerical results shown in figure 15 at small ${\textit {Fr}}$ (or small $\beta$), in that the slope of $\left \langle v_z \right \rangle /v_{q}$ goes to 0 as ${\textit {Fr}} \rightarrow 0$. Note that this result yields a reduction in rise speed quadratic in $\beta$, as does the analysis from Spelt & Biesheuvel (Reference Spelt and Biesheuvel1997) for small $\beta$, in which the constant is dependent on both the bubble's viscous response time and the size of the bubble in relation to the turbulence.

5.2. Case of $\beta \gg 1$: $v_0 \ll |\boldsymbol {v}'-\boldsymbol {u}'|$

In the second limit case, the main contribution to $|\boldsymbol {v}-\boldsymbol {u}|$ originates from the fluctuation, i.e. $v_0 \ll |\boldsymbol {v}'-\boldsymbol {u}'|$. This yields

(5.9)\begin{equation} \left \langle |\boldsymbol{v}-\boldsymbol{u}| \right \rangle = \left \langle |\boldsymbol{v}'-\boldsymbol{u}'| \right \rangle + \frac{1}{2} \frac{v_0^2}{\left \langle |\boldsymbol{v}'-\boldsymbol{u}'| \right \rangle} + {O}(v_0^4). \end{equation}

The next hypothesis is to consider that the statistical properties of the fluctuations of the horizontal and vertical components of $\boldsymbol {u}$ and $\boldsymbol {v}$ are similar (in other words, the fluctuations are decoupled from the mean). Equation (5.3) (for $u_i$, $i=x,y$) gives

(5.10)\begin{equation} \left \langle |\boldsymbol{v}-\boldsymbol{u}|(v_i' - u_i') \right \rangle = \alpha_2 d^* \left \langle (\boldsymbol{u} \boldsymbol{\cdot} \boldsymbol{\nabla}) u_i{'} \right \rangle, \end{equation}

which yields in the $z$ direction

(5.11)\begin{equation} \left \langle |\boldsymbol{v}-\boldsymbol{u}| (v_z'-u_z') \right \rangle = \alpha_2 d^* \left \langle (\boldsymbol{u} \boldsymbol{\cdot} \boldsymbol{\nabla}) u_z{'} \right \rangle. \end{equation}

With these assumptions, we can replace the pressure term in the vertical momentum equation (5.4) with the fluctuations in the vertical drag force, yielding

(5.12)\begin{equation} \left \langle |\boldsymbol{v}-\boldsymbol{u}|(v_z - u_z) \right \rangle =\left \langle |\boldsymbol{v}-\boldsymbol{u}| (v_z'-u_z') \right \rangle + \frac{1}{\beta^2}. \end{equation}

Using $v_z=v_0+v_z'$, $u_z = u_z'$ and (5.9), and keeping only the lowest order in power of $v_0$, we have

(5.13)\begin{equation} \left \langle |\boldsymbol{v}'-\boldsymbol{u}'| \right \rangle v_0 = \frac{1}{\beta^2}. \end{equation}

In dimensional form, this reads

(5.14)\begin{equation} \left \langle v_z \right \rangle = \frac{v_{q}^2}{\left \langle |\boldsymbol{v}'-\boldsymbol{u}'| \right \rangle}. \end{equation}

The final scaling of $v_0$ depends on the value of $\left \langle |\boldsymbol {v}'-\boldsymbol {u}'| \right \rangle$ for large fluctuations compared with the bubble rise velocity. This relationship is confirmed with our point-bubble data in figure 18, which shows the dimensionless rise speed plotted against $\left \langle |\boldsymbol {v}'-\boldsymbol {u}'| \right \rangle /v_{q}$, at two values of $d^*$. Although the two curves do not collapse when plotted against ${\textit {Fr}}$ (in the inset), both exhibit the same relationship between the rise speed and the mean value of the fluctuations of the slip velocity magnitude.

Figure 18.

The average dimensionless point-bubble rise speed as a function of $\left \langle {|\boldsymbol {v}'-\boldsymbol {u}'|} \right \rangle / v_{q}$. (Inset) The non-dimensional rise speed plotted against the Froude number. Comparing the two plots shows that the mean value of the slip fluctuation speed sets the rise speed.

From figure 17, this magnitude scales as $\left \langle |\boldsymbol {v}'-\boldsymbol {u}'| \right \rangle \propto u'$, set by an order-one constant that may depend on the bubble size $d^*$. On top of this, other size-dependent effects arise in the experiment which may not be captured by point-like simulations. For smaller $d^*$ the bubble dynamics should become highly intermittent, and the distribution of $|\boldsymbol {v}'-\boldsymbol {u}'|$ will both significantly decrease in magnitude and exhibit larger tails. The bubble deformation may also play an important role on the $d^*$ dependency of the bubble rise velocity.

Going back to the dimensional formulation, the high ${\textit {Fr}}$ (or high $\beta$) regime leads to the following scaling for the bubble rise velocity:

(5.15)\begin{equation} \left \langle v_z \right \rangle \propto \frac{v_{q}}{{\textit{Fr}}}, \end{equation}

which is indeed the scaling observed for relatively high ${\textit {Fr}}$ both in the experiments and point-bubble simulations in figures 10 and 15. This large Froude number scaling arises from the nonlinear drag force, which tends to make the slip velocity $\boldsymbol {v}-\boldsymbol {u}$ statistically isotropic and, as a consequence, reduces drastically the vertical slip velocity, henceforth the mean rise speed.

5.3. Bubble behaviour in a random Gaussian field

We note that our phenomenological model does not rely on flow features specific to HIT. As such, our results may be generalized to random flow fields which do not possess all the attributes of turbulent flows, as long as the typical bubble Reynolds number is sufficiently greater than 1 to yield a nonlinear relationship between the drag force and the slip velocity. To that end, we simulate the motion of point bubbles in a random Gaussian field composed of $N$ Fourier modes following Mei (Reference Mei1994), where the fluid velocity $\boldsymbol {u}$ is defined as

(5.16)\begin{equation} \boldsymbol{u}(\boldsymbol{x},t) = \frac{1}{\sqrt{N}} \sum_{m=1}^N (\boldsymbol{b}^m \cos (\boldsymbol{k}^m \boldsymbol{\cdot} \boldsymbol{x} + \omega^m t) + \boldsymbol{c}^m \sin (\boldsymbol{k}^m \boldsymbol{\cdot} \boldsymbol{x} + \omega^m t)), \end{equation}

in which $\boldsymbol {b}^m$, $\boldsymbol {c}^m$, $\boldsymbol {k}^m$ and $\omega ^m$ are picked from Gaussian distributions with 0 mean. The standard deviation of the distributions of $\boldsymbol {b}^m$ and $\boldsymbol {c}^m$ sets the large-scale velocity scale $u'$, the fluctuation velocity in HIT. The standard deviation of the distribution of the components $\boldsymbol {k}^m$ sets the large-scale length $1/k_0$, analogous to the integral length scale of the turbulence. Finally, the standard deviation $\omega _0 = u' k_0$ of the distribution of $\omega ^m$ sets the large-scale time scale $1/\omega _0$, analogous to $T_{int} = L_{int}/u'$ in HIT. We set the dimensionless bubble size to $d k_0 = 0.12$, and keep the constants in the Maxey–Riley equation equal to the values used in our main HIT simulations ($C_{D}=1$, $C_{M} = 0.5$, $C_{L}=0$).

The mean dimensionless rise velocity $\langle v_z \rangle / v_{q}$ for these point bubbles in the Gaussian fields is shown as a function of ${Fr} = u'/\sqrt {gd}$ in figure 19 as the solid black curve. As in HIT, $\langle v_z \rangle / v_{q}$ follows a $1/{Fr}$ scaling at large Froude number. Here, the scaling is more pronounced in the slip velocity $\langle v_z - u_z \rangle$ than in the mean rise velocity $\langle v_z \rangle$.

Figure 19.

The mean rise velocity (black, solid line), mean magnitude of the slip velocity (cyan, dashed line) and mean vertical slip velocity (dark red, dotted line), of point bubbles in random Gaussian fields, with $d k_0 = 0.12$ and varying ${Fr}$. At large ${Fr}$, the mean dimensionless rise velocity scales as $1/{Fr}$ (as does the mean vertical slip velocity, since the over-sampling of $u_z<0$ is negligible), and the mean magnitude of the slip velocity scales as ${Fr}$, congruent with our phenomenological model.

Further, the average magnitude of the slip velocity $\langle | \boldsymbol {v} - \boldsymbol {u}| \rangle$ (shown in figure 19 as the dashed cyan curve) also scales with $u'$ in the Gaussian field. In both HIT and this random Gaussian field, the slowdown of the bubble due to the external flow is the result of the nonlinear drag force acting on the bubble. Since the fluctuation magnitude of the slip velocity increases linearly with ${Fr}$, the quadratic drag force along the vertical direction increases proportionally. From a balance with buoyancy force, the average bubble vertical velocity then decreases as $1/{Fr}$.

5.4. Point-bubble simulations with variable drag coefficient

To assess the use of a constant $C_{D}$, we have run simulations of bubbles in random Gaussian fields using a time-varying drag coefficient, which is evaluated using the instantaneous bubble Reynolds number ${Re}_{p} = |\boldsymbol {v}-\boldsymbol {u}| d / \nu$. There is no general formula for the drag coefficient in an unstationary turbulent flow. Following Snyder et al. (Reference Snyder, Knio, Katz and Le Maître2007), we approximate the instantaneous drag coefficient by the value for a rigid sphere in a stationary flow of the same instantaneous Reynolds number, for which we have

(5.17)\begin{align} C_{D} &= \frac{24}{{Re}_{p}}, \quad {Re}_{p} < 1, \end{align}

(5.18)\begin{align} &= \left( \frac{24}{{Re}_{p}} \right) \left( 1 + \frac{3.6}{{Re}_{p}^{0.313}} \left( \frac{{Re}_{p} - 1}{19} \right)^2 \right), \quad 1 \leqslant {Re}_{p} \leqslant 20, \end{align}

(5.19)\begin{align} &= \left( \frac{24}{{Re}_{p}} \right) \left( 1 + 0.15 {Re}_{p}^{0.687} \right), \quad {Re}_{p} > 20. \end{align}

The viscosity $\nu$ in the simulation is defined by matching the bubble Archimedes number ${Ar}= g d^3/\nu ^2$ to the corresponding values for an air bubble in water with $d=1$, 2 and 4 mm. For each value of ${Ar}$, we run simulations with a range of ${Fr}$ and $d k_0 = 0.1$.

The quiescent rise velocity is obtained for each condition by integrating the equation of motion using the variable drag coefficient with a quiescent velocity field. The same integration is then carried out using a random Gaussian field (as described in § 5.3), and the corresponding reduction in rise velocity is calculated. Finally, we calculate $\langle C_{D} \rangle$ from this simulation, and run a final simulation using the version of the Maxey–Riley equation with constant coefficients (1.9) employed in our turbulent simulations, with $C_{D}$ fixed at this average value.

Results are shown in figure 20. Panel (a) shows that the variation itself in $C_{D}$ does not have a large impact on the rise velocity, as the varying-$C_{D}$ and constant-$C_{D}$ curves for any $d$ nearly coincide. In other words, the use of a constant value of $C_{D}$ does not produce results significantly different than would be obtained with a time-varying $C_{D}$, provided that the constant value taken for $C_{D}$ is representative of the time-varying one. Panel (b) shows how, for fixed bubble sizes, the average value of $C_{D}$ changes with Froude number. As the Froude number is increased, the mean particle Reynolds number ${Re}_{p} = |\boldsymbol {v}-\boldsymbol {u}| d / \nu$ increases, and thus the average value of $C_{D}$ decreases from the quiescent value, due to the increased typical slip velocity. Thus, the variation of $\left \langle C_{D} \right \rangle$ with ${\textit {Fr}}$ may affect the scaling of $\left \langle v_z \right \rangle$ in a way that has not been considered in our phenomenological model. However, the exact variation of $C_{D}$ with the local Reynolds number ${Re}_{p}$ would require further analysis to be properly quantified, in particular in an unstationary, turbulent flow.

Figure 20.

(a) Rise velocity for bubbles in random Gaussian fields with a variable drag coefficient ${C}_D$ using the local Reynolds number ${Re}_{p}$ and the Snyder et al. (Reference Snyder, Knio, Katz and Le Maître2007) formulation (solid line). Dashed lines correspond to the case of a constant drag coefficient equal to the average value of the variable-$C_{D}$. Colours correspond to different bubble sizes ($d=1$, 2 and 4 mm). We observe no significant change in rise speed between the constant-$C_{D}$ and variable-$C_{D}$ formulations. (b) Time average drag coefficient ${C}_D$ as a function of the Froude number. The decrease of ${C}_D$ with the Froude number is attributed to the increase of the mean local Reynolds number ${Re}_{p}$, due to the increased typical slip velocity. (c) The p.d.f.s of $C_{D}$ for ${Fr}=0.7$, 3.1 and 13.0 for simulations with ${Ar}$ corresponding to $d=1\ \textrm {mm}$ (red) and $d=4\ \textrm {mm}$ (blue).