Drag coefficient of a rising bubble in a shear-thinning fluid using the power-law scheme coupled with a Cahn-Hilliard equation with a variable mobility: A lattice Boltzmann study and comparison with experiment

Abstract

This study aims to investigate the behavior of multicomponent fluid flows consisting of Newtonian and non-Newtonian components, especially terminal velocity of a rising bubble in a power-law fluid. A recent lattice Boltzmann (LB) model is extended using power-law scheme to be able to simulate both Newtonian and non-Newtonian fluid flows at high density and viscosity ratios. Also, a variable mobility is introduced in this study to minimize the unphysical error around small bubbles in the domain. A three-component fluid flow system is examined using a constant and variable mobility. It is shown that each component has more stability using variable mobility while constant mobility causes interface dissipation, leading to mass loss gradually. In addition, two test cases including power-law fluid flows driven between two parallel plates are conducted to show the accuracy and capability of the model. To find a grid-independent computational domain, a grid independency test is carried out to show that a 200 × 400 domain size is suitable 1