# Experimental investigation of the turbulence induced by a bubble swarm rising within an incident turbulence

## TL;DR

This experimental study investigates how a bubble swarm influences turbulence in a homogeneous flow, revealing distinct wake regions and the dependence of flow properties on bubble and turbulence parameters.

## Contribution

It provides detailed characterization of flow regions and statistical properties of turbulence induced by bubbles in a homogeneous turbulent environment.

## Key findings

- Velocity fluctuations in primary wake resemble single bubble in still liquid
- Far field velocity fluctuations follow Gaussian distribution
- Flow agitation depends mainly on the bubblance parameter

## Abstract

This work reports an experimental characterisation of the flow properties in a homogeneous bubble swarm rising at high-Reynolds-numbers within a homogeneous and isotropic turbulent flow. Both the gas volume fraction {\alpha} and the velocity fluctuations of the carrier flow before bubble injection are varied, respectively, in the ranges 0% < alpha < 0.93% and 2.3 cm/s < urms < 5.5 cm/s. The so-called bubblance parameter is used to compare the ratio of the kinetic energy generated by the bubbles to the one produced by the incident turbulence, and is varied from 0 to 1.3. Conditional measurements of the velocity field downstream of the bubbles in the vertical direction allow us to disentangle three regions that have specific statistical properties, namely the primary wake, the secondary wake and the far field. While the fluctuations in the primary wake are similar to the one of a single bubble rising in a liquid at rest, the statistics of the velocity fluctuations in the far field follow Gaussian distribution, similar to the one produced by the homogenous and isotropic turbulence at the largest scales. In the secondary wake region, the conditional probability density function (pdf) of the velocity fluctuations is asymmetric and shows an exponential tail for the positive fluctuations and a Gaussian one for the negative fluctuations. The overall agitation thus results from the combination of these three contributions and depends mainly on the bubblance parameter.