ANALYTICAL AND NUMERICAL STUDY OF LARGE BUBBLE/BUBBLE AND BUBBLE/FLOW INTERACTIONS

The presence of cavities in a liquid can have significant effects on its behaviour and its flow characteristics. In practical flow situations, these effects cannot be fully understood or predicted without addressing complicated, but nonetheless fundamental phenomena associated with the dynamics, interactions, and deformation of bubbles. The importance of these phenomena has long been recognized, but has largely been neglected due to the difficulty of the associated mathematical problems. In this contribution, bubble shape oscillations in response to nonuniform flow fields and/or due to their interaction with other bubbles are considered using both a matched asymptotic expansions technique and a fully three-dimensional boundary integral method. Results from both approaches in a few particular cases are compared, and the limits of application of these methods for these cases is assessed.