Interaction between a Rising Bubble and a Stationary Droplet Immersed in a Liquid Pool using Ternary Conservative Phase-Field Lattice Boltzmann Method

Abstract

When a stationary bubble and a stationary droplet immersed in a liquid pool are brought in contact with each other, they form a bubble-droplet aggregate. Its equilibrium morphology and stability largely depend on the combination of different components' surface tensions, known as spreading factor. In this study, we look at the interaction between a rising bubble and a stationary droplet to better understand the dynamics of coalescence and rising as well as morphological changes for the bubble-droplet aggregate. A systematic study is conducted on the interaction processes with various bubble sizes and spreading factors. The current simulation framework consists of the ternary conservative phase-field Lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) for interface tracking and the velocity-pressure LBM for hydrodynamics, which is validated for the benchmark cases such as liquid lens and parasitic currents around a static droplet with several popular surface tension formulations. We further test our LBM for the morphology changes of two droplets initially in contact with various spreading factors and depict the final morphologies in a phase diagram. The separated, partially engulfed and completely engulfed morphologies can be replicated by systematically altering the sign of the spreading factors. The rising bubble and stationary droplet interaction is simulated based on the final morphologies obtained under stationary conditions by imposing an imaginary buoyancy force on the rising bubble. The results indicate that the bubble-droplet aggregate with double emulsion morphology can minimize the distotion of the bubble-droplet aggregate and achieve a greater terminal velocity than the aggregate with partially engulfed morphology.