Microbubbles

Microbubbles (about 50-500 microns in size) have been shown experimentally to drastically reduce the drag on a ship's hull moving through water, hence, reducing fuel consumption. The aim of this research is to develop a computational model, based on first-principles, of microbubbles in a turbulent flow. Through the use of a new model, plus the resources of NCSA's latest Linux cluster, this team produced a 40-fold increase from previous work - jumping from only 500 microbubbles to over 20,000.

Suchuan (Steve) Dong, Jin Xu, Martin Maxey, and George Karniadakis (Brown University)

  • CRUNCH web page

    Supercomputing 2002


    Streamwise velocity contours for a system of 21,600 microbubbles in a turbulent channel. Blue indicates regions of lower flow velocity; red indicates regions of higher velocity. The flow is traveling away from the viewer, and only every fifth bubble is shown.


    Microbubbles released above and below, showing mixing over time.


    Volume rendering of the flow streamwise velocity contours for a system of 21,600 microbubbles in a turbulent channel. Only 10,800 bubbles seeded near the lower wall are shown. The bubbles are color-coded with their velocity magnitudes. Blue indicates lower velocity; red indicates higher velocity.

    Randy and Steve in front of microbubble movie playing on tiled display wall
    (Click on image for larger version)

    Randy Heiland