Drag and Lift Forces Study on Single Bubble Rising in an Elbow

Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) plays an increasing role in providing analysis of the flow in fluids. CFD software, an important part of building and analyzing a flow model, is used to calculate flow parameters, as well as the design and simulation of fluidics. The performance of the software is often taken as a standard to evaluate the software. The performance evaluation and scalability analysis of ANSYS Fluent and OpenFOAM are done in the first part of the work. The bubble rises mainly due to buoyancy and drag force. However, once the bubble enters the elbow, it rises also in horizontal direction and the lift force comes into play. In the second part of the work, the development of the drag and lift coefficient of the bubble rising inside the elbow is studied with the variation of its size and the liquid inlet velocity of the elbow for the range of (0.001 < Re < 10) and (0.1 < Bo < 100). The results of the drag coefficient of the bubble in the vertical part of the elbow are compared to previous correlations and the changing trend of the drag and lift coefficient in the whole flowing process is summed in all test cases.