Publication 19-CNA-007
Surfactant Stabilized Bubbles Flowing in a Newtonian Fluid
Eilis Rosenbaum
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA
and
National Energy Technology Laboratory
626 Cochrans Mill Road, P.O. Box 10940
Pittsburgh, PA 15236
Eilis.Rosenbaum@netl.doe.gov
Mehrdad Massoudi
Center for Nonlinear Analysis
Department of Mathematical Sciences
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
and
National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL)
U.S. Department of Energy
626 Cochrans Mill Road, P.O. Box 10940
Pittsburgh, PA 15236
massoudi@netl.doe.gov
Kaushik Dayal
Center for Nonlinear Analysis
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Department of Materials Science and Engineering
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
Kaushik.Dayal@cmu.edu
Abstract: Bubbles suspended in a fluid cause the suspension to have different rheological properties than the base fluid. Generally, the viscosity of the suspension increases as the volume fraction of the bubbles is increased. A current application, and motivation for this study, is in wellbore cements used for hydrocarbon extraction and carbon sequestration. In these settings, the gas bubbles are dispersed into the cement to reduce the density as well as improve the properties for specific conditions or wellbore issues. In this paper, we use Stokesian dynamics to numerically simulate the behavior of a large number of bubbles suspended in a Newtonian fluid. Going beyond prior work on simulating particles in suspension, we account for the nature of bubbles by allowing for slip on the bubble surface, the deflection on the bubble surface, and a bubble-bubble pairwise interaction that represents the surfactant physics; we do not account for bubble compressibility. We incorporate these interactions and simulate bubble suspensions of monodisperse size at several volume fractions. We find that the bubbles remain better dispersed compared to hard spherical particles that show a greater tendency to structure or cluster.
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