Experimental investigation of bubble growth and detachment in stagnant liquid column using image – based analysis

Abstract

An experimental study has been carried out to characterize bubble formation, growth, and detachment mechanisms in a stagnant liquid column. Both bubble frequency and bubble detachment size were measured in different gas flow rates, injector diameters and orientations, submergence height, and liquid properties. Experiments were performed for air injection flow rate ranges between 200 mlph and 1200 mlph using needle diameters of 1.6, 1.19, 1.07, and 0.84 mm submerged in liquids with viscosities of 0.001, 0.1, 0.35, and 1 Pa.s. The data for bubble formation was obtained using a high-speed imaging technique. The results show that the bubble diameter at the departure increases as the needle diameter, liquid viscosity, and gas flow rate increase. In addition, the decrease in the submergence height results in a larger bubble at the departure. In order to analyze the changes in bubble detachment characteristics, a force modelling on a growing bubble was proposed. The experimental data were utilized for training a feed-forward back propagation neural network system to estimate the bubble detachment diameter. They were also used to propose a correlation to predict bubble diameter at the departure. The proposed correlation is found to be in the range of ± 8% of the obtained experimental data.