<p>Due to the importance of foam, the availability and handling of foam in many industries and limited number of researches in this area and complicated flow structures and phenomena in the wet foam flows, further research is needed. Most of the studies made are due to its complexity focus on the geometry and topology of stationary foam and not on the flow itself, so the importance of studying the foam flow is felt more than ever. Foam is created by trapping pockets of gas in a liquid. Some of its applications are in cosmetic raw materials, topical gels and creams, lotions, toothpastes, shampoos, and so on. Foams are divided into two groups of dry foam and aqueous foam. In dry foam, the bubbles form polyhedral cells, which are not flat and in aqueous foam the bubbles are spherical. To better understand the evolution of a foam structure, it is important to comprehend some important parameters such as the void fraction, the foam quality and the surface tension. Surface tension is regulated as a very essential and effective parameter in foam stability using surface active agents. Surface active agents play a very important role in many practical applications, and when applied to a modest amount in water, it significantly reduces surface tension, which affects the stability of bubbles. The purpose of this study is to analyze the flow of foam and to study some of the important parameters involved in the problem such as volume fraction, velocity and surface tension. The most numerical researches done are flow analysis as a single-phase, so numerical simulation in this study is the first simulation in the foam flow, in which both the bubbles and the water representing the fluid and gas are present in the flow and computational domain. In this study, which is a simplified mode of foam flow, the fluid flows along with bubbles containing surfactant in a duct is considered. The duct length is 60 mm and its height is 15mm. The numerical solution was performed for two different Reynolds numbers of 50 and 100 and three Weber numbers of 0.405, 0.27 and 0.203 and the effect of the above parameters on the flow behavior and its physical properties have been investigated using an open source software. It was found that in foam flow, there is a large values of velocity fluctuations which varies with the flow parameters. By increasing the Reynolds number, the pressure loss increases, the range of the velocity fluctuations and the magnitude of the fluctuations decreases. By increasing the Weber number, the pressure loss, the range of the velocity fluctuations and the magnitude of the fluctuations decreases. And the phenomenon of coalescence causes a sudden increase in momentum speed.</p>

Elementary Numerical Analysis of Wet Foam Formation and Study of Its Flow Structures and Physical Behavior

Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/FEDSM/FEDSM2021/volume/85284

ASME 2021 Fluids Engineering Division Summer Meeting (FEDSM2021)

Supporting the need among researchers worldwide for additional online and multimedia content, ASME now offers the ASME Conference Video Collection. This platform will collect and provide long-term access to conference presentation videos, encompassing all technology areas within ASME's technical conference and events program. About 30,000-40,000 engineers across all mechanical engineering and related disciplines participate in ASME conferences each year. This includes authors of approximately 6,000 to 8,000 technical papers published by ASME, the majority of whom also submit video presentations for our virtual conferences. The video collection will be available as an add-on to existing product packages or as a separate subscription.