UJA2013/08/05

  • Title: STUDY OF THE GENERATION AND RISE OF BUBBLES UNDER COUPLED FEEDING CONDITIONS AND ACOUSTICAL/GEOMETRICAL FORCING.
  • Reference: UJA2013/08/05
  • Funded by: Universidad de Jaén
  • Duration: 15/02/2014-14/02/2016
  • Principal Investigator: Rocío Bolaños Jiménez
  • Number of researchers: 6
  • Budget: 14.400 €
  • Summary: This project represents a progression of the knowledge acquired by this group about the dynamics of bubble formation towards problems closer to technological applications in order to improve the aeration devices, thereby ensuring a more efficient use of energy. To understand and characterize the formation of bubbles, a thorough study has been necessary to understand the problem in controlled conditions, in particular, at constant feed gas flow rate or constant gas pressure. However, in most real applications, neither the gas flow rate nor the pressure are constant, but the process takes places under mixed or coupled conditions, that is, gas flow rate and pressure change during the bubble formation. Therefore, one of the goals of this project is to deeply investigate the bubble formation under these realistic conditions from the theoretical, experimental and numerical points of views. Moreover, the characterization of the wake which develops behind the bubbles detached from the injector is not completely solved and represents also a critical issue to perform the technology. Therefore, and due to recent and promising results which have been obtained by numerical simulations, this project also aims to deepen the study of the wake by stability analysis and by means of experiments. Finally, since for most applications the bubble size must be as small and uniform as possible, the ultimate goal of this proposal is to design a device to increase the frequency of bubble, and therefore, decrease the size of the bubbles in a controlled manner. In order to that, we pretend to force the bubble breakup through an acoustical mechanism which will be investigated by means of experiments and by numerical simulations using open source codes.

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