CFD-PBM simulation of nanobubble distribution characteristics in horizontal pipeline

Abstract The distribution characteristics of flow and transmission of nanobubbles in pipelines are of great significance for their applications in energy storage, agriculture, medicine, and other fields. The existing numerical simulation studies for nanobubbles in pipeline gas-liquid two-phase mixing still suffer from the deficiency of capturing the accuracy of the complex behavior of nanobubbles in the actual environment and cannot fully consider the influence of the dynamic behavior of nanobubbles, which limits the efficiency and accuracy of the simulation. In order to reveal the development law of nanobubbles in pipeline flow, this paper simulates the flow of nanobubbles in the pipeline based on the population balance model (PBM) and combines it with computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to investigate the effects of gas phase volume fraction on the flow of nanobubbles in the horizontal pipeline, and to study their distribution characteristics. The calculation results show that the increase in the volume fraction of the imported gas phase leads to a more dispersed particle size distribution, an increase in size, and a decrease in the distribution density of the nanobubbles.