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Breaking bubbles across multiple time scales in turbulence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 March 2024

Yinghe Qi
Affiliation:
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21218, USA
Xu Xu
Affiliation:
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21218, USA
Shiyong Tan
Affiliation:
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21218, USA
Shijie Zhong
Affiliation:
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21218, USA
Qianwen Wu
Affiliation:
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21218, USA
Rui Ni*
Affiliation:
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21218, USA
*
†Email address for correspondence: rui.ni@jhu.edu

Abstract

The familiar process of bubbles generated via breaking waves in the ocean is foundational to many natural and industrial applications. In this process, large pockets of entrained gas are successively fragmented by the ambient turbulence into smaller and smaller bubbles. The key question is how long it takes for the bubbles to reach terminal sizes for a given system. Despite decades of effort, the reported breakup time from multiple experiments differs significantly. Here, to reconcile those results, rather than focusing on one scale, we measure multiple time scales associated with the process through a unique experiment that resolves bubbles’ local deformation and curvature. The results emphasize that the scale separation among various time scales is controlled by the Weber number, similar to how the Reynolds number determines the scale separation in single-phase turbulence, but shows a distinct transition at a critical Weber number.

Information

Type
JFM Papers
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press.
Figure 0

Figure 1. (a) A schematic of the vertical water tank as described in Appendix A. The blue arrows represent the direction of the flow. Inset: a 3-D model of the jet array system for turbulence generation. (b) Top view of the configuration of cameras and LED panels around the octagonal test section. The black dots in the test section represent tracer particles around the bubble. (c) From top to bottom: the 3-D reconstruction of a breaking bubble using the visual hull method; the distribution of the interfacial velocity $u_f$ for the same bubble; the distribution of the interfacial curvature $\kappa$ for the same bubble.

Figure 1

Figure 2. A sequence of snapshots of a breaking bubble with $D=10$ mm. The green, blue, purple and red shaded area represents the oscillation process, the inertial deformation process, the capillary-driven process and the bubble lifetime, respectively.

Figure 2

Table 1. Summary of parameters and dimensionless numbers of the experimental datasets included in the current work (Exp B and Exp C are the supplementary datasets). Here, $\eta$, $\tau _\eta$, $L$ and $Re_\lambda$ are the Kolmogorov length scale, Kolmogorov time scale, integral length scale and Taylor-scale Reynolds number, respectively.

Figure 3

Figure 3. (a) The PDFs of the normalized interfacial curvature $\kappa D/2$ for all breaking bubbles in Exp A. Blue represents different times before the breakup. The red line represents the prediction based on the model (2.5). The solid part of the red line marks the range of $\kappa$ where the model is valid. (b) The same plots for Exp B.

Figure 4

Figure 4. (a) The time evolution of the averaged standard deviation of the curvature $\langle \sigma _{\kappa D/2}\rangle$ for Exp A. The blue shaded area marks the time scale $\tau _e$. (b) The same plots for Exp B. (c–e) The time evolution of the mean aspect ratio $\langle \alpha \rangle$ (solid lines) of breaking bubbles for Exp A, B and C, respectively. The blue shaded area marks the time scale $\tau _e$.

Figure 5

Figure 5. The inertial deformation time scale $\tau _e$ as a function of the bubble size. Squares represent the experimental data from all the datasets. The solid lines are the predictions based on the model (2.8). The purple dashed lines are the turn-over times of the bubble-sized eddies. The black dashed line represents the second-mode natural oscillation time scale of the bubble.

Figure 6

Figure 6. (a) PDFs of the interfacial velocity $u_f$ for 3–6 mm breaking bubbles in Exp B. Purple solid lines represent the different times before the breakup. The black dashed line marks the Gaussian distribution. The grey solid line shows the PDF of one component of the single-phase fluctuation velocity $u_x^\prime$ normalized by its standard deviation. (b) The time evolution of the averaged standard deviation of the interfacial velocity $\langle \sigma _{u_f}\rangle$. The purple shaded area marks the time scale $\tau _c$.

Figure 7

Figure 7. The comparison among different time scales associated with bubble breakup predicted by models, including the bubble lifetime $\tau _l$ (red solid line), the inertial deformation time scale $\tau _e$ (blue solid line), and the capillary time scale $\tau _c$ (grey solid line), as functions of $We$. The red and blue symbols represent the experimental data of $\tau _l$ by Vejražka et al. (2018) and Martínez-Bazán et al. (1999), respectively. The red and blue shaded areas mark $We<10$ and $We>10$.

Figure 8

Figure 8. Estimated energy dissipation rate $\langle \epsilon \rangle$ based on the longitudinal (red) and transverse (blue) second-order structure function. The dashed line represents $\langle \epsilon \rangle =0.1$ m$^2\,$s$^{-3}$.