A Study on the Flow Behavior of Microbubbles in Capillary Tubes

Date
2014-01-14
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Abstract
Recently microbubbles have gained an enormous attention in many fields such as drug delivery and ultrasound imaging, oil reservoirs either as sealing agents or means of mobility reduction and CO2 sequestration. All of these applications involve microbubble flow thorough capillary environments. This study offers a better understanding of microbubbles’ flow behavior in capillary tubes to provide a fundamental understanding of their flow in capillary environments. Stabilized microbubbles have been injected to a capillary tube in which the pressure drop of the flow has been monitored by a differential pressure transducer. To calculate viscosity, theoretical viscosity equations have then been applied to the pressure drop. Besides, the pressure drop was also used to determine wall friction factor. The effect of capillary tube diameter, capillary tube length, quality of microbubbles and flow rate on the viscosity and wall friction factor of the mixture has been assessed. The data was then used to develop a correlation to regenerate experimental viscosity data of microbubbles, which represents the experimental viscosity data with an absolute average relative deviation (AARD) less than 1.3 %. It was also found that friction factor of microbubble have a linear relationship with non-Newtonian Reynolds number.
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Keywords
Engineering--Chemical, Engineering--Petroleum
Citation
Shams, M. M. (2014). A Study on the Flow Behavior of Microbubbles in Capillary Tubes (Master's thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/25048