Unravelling CO2 and Electrolyte effects in Bubbly Flows

Abstract

Bubbly flows are ubiquitously found in natural systems and are widely used in (bio)-chemical and energy-producing processes. A variety of design options, ease of maintenance, and a large operability window make bubble columns a commonplace across industries, ranging from oil processing to biotechnology and electrolyzers. Despite their wide applicability and advantages, the complexity of designing and optimizing largescale bubble columns arises from inherent multiphysics - multiscale phenomena. The design and scale-up methodologies, from laboratory to large-scale, require a detailed understanding of the interplay between the different physical phenomena and processes, for a variety of fluid compositions and operation conditions, at various scales: from single bubbles to dense bubbly flows in industrial situations. For example: (i) the interplay between rheology, hydrodynamics and interfacial phenomena for a single bubble; (ii) the interplay between the collective dynamics of the bubbles inside the column, the bubble size distribution and the bubble generation process....