Abstract
Abstract
Highlights
The motion of an elongated bubble confined in a small geometry is typical of many biological and engineering systems
The goal of this paper is to study the dynamics of a confined Taylor bubble that moves in a shear-thinning fluid and to clarify the competition of the zero-shear-rate and the shear-thinning effects on bubble characteristics
We study the motion of a confined Taylor bubble in a shear-thinning fluid
Summary
The motion of an elongated bubble confined in a small geometry is typical of many biological and engineering systems. Both the local velocity field and integral variables (e.g. pressure drop and film thickness) are poorly predicted in free-surface flows due to the unrealistically and unbounded growth of the viscosity at small shear rates This is confirmed by the work of Hewson, Kapur & Gaskell (2009) that studied the motion of a Taylor bubble through both power-law and an Ellis fluids. In all the aforementioned studies, a generalized understanding of the bubble motion that embeds both the low- and high-shear-rate behaviours is still missing, including a generalization of the scaling laws for the film thickness and the bubble speed To fill this gap, the goal of this paper is to study the dynamics of a confined Taylor bubble that moves in a shear-thinning fluid and to clarify the competition of the zero-shear-rate and the shear-thinning effects on bubble characteristics. The results obtained shed light on the mechanisms that control the motion of a Taylor bubble in a realistic shear-thinning fluid
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