Hydrodynamics of shear thinning fluid in a square microchannel: a numerical approach

Abstract

Abstract In this present work, a numerical study was conducted for the formation of a slug bubble for shear thinning non-Newtonian fluid in a cross-junction 2-D square horizontal microchannel. Carboxymethyl cellulose (CMC) of concentration 0.2 (w/w%) percent was used as a continuous phase that shows the shear thinning behavior of non-Newtonian fluid and Nitrogen (N2) was used as the discrete phase. The pressure-based double precision solver was used in ANSYS FLUENT 2021 R2 with the volume of fluid (VOF) method. The finite volume method is applied for the discretization of the continuity and momentum equation. This article also focuses on the fluctuation of static pressure, mechanism of slug, annular, and churn annular flow i.e., obtained by the variation in the inlet velocities. On the other hand, a concept that was applied in this work was also validated with the prior literature data.