Chunheng Zhao: Numerical study of Oil-Bubble interaction using Conservative phase-field Lattice Boltzmann Method

Abstract: We investigate the simulation of a rising bubble and a stationary droplet interaction to gain a better understanding of the rising dynamics and the morphology changing of bubble-droplet aggregate. A detailed study is conducted on the interaction process under different-size bubbles with various combinations of spreading factors. The current simulation framework consists of the conservative phase-field Lattice Boltzmann equation (LBE) for interface tracking and the velocity-pressure LBE for hydrodynamics. We simulate the contact line dynamics to confirm the method's accuracy. We further investigate the morphology changing of two contact droplets under different combinations of spreading factors and depict the final morphologies in a diagram. The separated, partially engulfed and complete engulfed morphologies can be replicated by systematically altering the sign of the spreading factors. The rising bubble and droplet interaction is simulated based on different final morphologies by adding a body force. The results show that the aggregate with double emulsion morphology can avoid distortion and maintain a greater terminal velocity than the aggregate with partially engulfed morphology.

Talk is online on Zoom. Please contact "timokoch at uio.no" for the Zoom link. This talk is part of the Mechanics Lunch Seminar series. Bring-your-own-lunch and lots of questions.