Experimental Study of Horizontal Bubble Plume With Computational Fluid Dynamics Benchmarking

In order to study the two-phase flow behaviors of a horizontal bubble plume in a tank, experimental tests along with computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations were carried out in this paper. An experimental facility was designed and constructed which allows air–water bubble jet being injected horizontally into a water tank by three-parallel injector nozzles with different gas and liquid superficial velocities (〈jg〉in = 2.7–5.7 m/s and 〈jf〉in = 1.8–3.4 m/s). Two sizes of injector nozzles (D = 0.053 m and 0.035 m) were tested to examine the injector size effect. Important parameters including void fraction, fluid velocity, bubble Sauter mean diameter, and their distributions in the tank were measured and analyzed. In addition to the experimental work, selected flow conditions were simulated with ANSYS CFX 13.0. Compared with the experimental data, the present CFD simulation can predict the general trends of void and flow distributions and the recirculation fluid velocity with an accuracy of ±30%. The present CFD simulation methodology has been validated by the experimental results and can be applied to bubble plume analyses and design.