Title: Surfactant stabilized bubbles flowing in a Newtonian fluid

Abstract

Bubbles suspended in a fluid cause the suspension to have different rheological properties than the base fluid. In general, 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 with hard spherical particles that show a greater tendency to structure or cluster.

Authors:

Rosenbaum, Eilis ^[1]; Massoudi, Mehrdad ^[2]; Dayal, Kaushik  ^[3]

• Search DOE PAGES for author "Dayal, Kaushik"
• Search DOE PAGES for ORCID "0000-0002-0516-3066"
• Search orcid.org for ORCID "0000-0002-0516-3066"

---

+ Show Author Affiliations

1. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA, National Energy Technology Laboratory, Pittsburgh, PA, USA
2. National Energy Technology Laboratory, Pittsburgh, PA, USA
3. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA, Center for Nonlinear Analysis, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA, Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

Publication Date:

2019-06-26

Sponsoring Org.:

USDOE

OSTI Identifier:

1568901

Resource Type:

Published Article

Journal Name:

Mathematics and Mechanics of Solids

Additional Journal Information:

Journal Name: Mathematics and Mechanics of Solids Journal Volume: 24 Journal Issue: 12; Journal ID: ISSN 1081-2865

Publisher:

SAGE Publications

Country of Publication:

United States

Language:

English