Shock waves in a liquid containing small gas bubbles

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Abstract
Numerical and experimental studies of the transient shock wave phenomena in a liquid containing non-condensable gas bubbles are presented. In the numerical analysis, individual bubbles are tracked to estimate the effect of volume oscillations on the wave phenomena. Thermal processes inside each bubble, which have significant influence on the volume oscillation, are calculated directly using full equations for mass, momentum and energy conservation, and those results are combined with the averaged conservation equations of the bubbly mixture to simulate the propagation of the shock wave. A silicone oil/nitrogen bubble mixture, in which the initial bubble radius is about 0.6 mm and the gas volume fraction is 0.15% – 0.4%, is used in the shock tube experiments. The inner diameter of the shock tube is chosen to be 18 mm and 52 mm in order to investigate the multidimensional effects on the wave phenomena. In a fairly uniform bubbly mixture, the experimental results agree well with the numerical ones computed using a uniform spatial distribution of bubbles. On the other hand, in all the other experiments, the bubbles in the shock tubes are not distributed uniformly, being relatively concentrated along the axis of the tube. This non-uniformity substantially alters the profile of the shock waves. The numerical predictions where such a distribution is taken into account agree well with those experimental data.

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