There is little knowledge of how bubbles react to the turbulence in a boundary layer. This study is intended to document and understand bubble dispersion caused by large-scale structures. Cinematography particle image velocimetry is used to identify velocity vectors along with bubble velocity throughout a two-dimensional plane of a turbulent flowfield as a function of time. This is achieved by combining the PIV technique with a high-resolution movie camera.
Results indicate microbubble transport is strongly dependent on velocity and vorticity fluctuations.
Various numerical approximations for describing the turbulent bubble interactions are being developed for validation and parameter investigation. These include continuous random walk descriptions of the turbulent fluctuations along the bubble path and DNS descriptions to provide a fully resolved field. The objective is to properly predict the uniformity of the liquid water content produced by spray bars in the NASA Lewis Icing Research Tunnel used to simulate clouds for icing tests. A computational fluid dynamics methodology is being developed that treats the droplets in Lagrangian form and the tunnel aerodynamics in Eulerian form. Recent research has allowed a novel CPU acceleration.