Intensifying cavitating flows in microfluidic devices with poly(vinyl alcohol) (PVA) microbubbles

Cavitation and the energy associated with the collapse of resulting cavitation bubbles constitute an important research subject. The collapse of the hydrodynamic cavitation bubbles at the outlet of the flow elements leads to a high energy release and generates localized shock waves and a large temperature rise on exposed surfaces. The concept of "hydrodynamic cavitation on chip" is an emerging topic which emphasizes phase change phenomena in microscale and their utilizations in energy and biomedical applications. This study is aimed to investigate the potential of poly(vinyl alcohol) (PVA) Microbubbles (MBs) to generate cavitation bubbles and to evaluate their effects on flow regimes and energy dissipation. For this, three different microchannel configurations with different roughness elements were considered. The structural side wall and surface roughened channels were fabricated along with the smooth channel according to the techniques adopted from semiconductor based micro-fabrication. The upstream pressure varied from 1 to 7 MPa, and the flow patterns were recorded and analyzed using a high-speed camera. The pressure was locally measured at three locations along the microfluidic devices to determine the conditions for fully developed cavitating flows. The results were compared to the pure water case, and different trends for the cavitating flow pattern transitions were obtained for the water-PVA MB solution case. Accordingly, the twin cavity clouds extended to the end of the side wall roughened channel at a lower upstream pressure for the case of PVA MBs, while the smooth and surface roughened channels do not demonstrate this flow pattern. In addition, the cavitation number has the lowest values under the same working conditions for the case of PVA MBs. Moreover, the impact pressure generated by the bubble collapse inside the side wall roughened channel for the case of PVA MBs was notably higher than that for pure water. Published by AIP Publishing.

Engineered Lateral Roughness Element Implementation and Working Fluid Alteration to Intensify Hydrodynamic Cavitating Flows on a Chip for Energy Harvesting

Morteza Ghorbani, Luis Guillermo Villanueva Torrijo

Hydrodynamic cavitation is considered an effective tool to be used in different applications, such as surface cleaning, ones in the food industry, energy harvesting, water treatment, biomedical applications, and heat transfer enhancement. Thus, both characterization and intensification of cavitation phenomenon are of great importance. This study involves design and optimization of cavitation on chip devices by utilizing wall roughness elements and working fluid alteration. Seven different microfluidic devices were fabricated and tested. In order to harvest more energy from cavitating flows, different roughness elements were used to decrease the inlet pressure (input to the system), at which cavitation inception occurs. The implemented wall roughness elements were engineered structures in the shape of equilateral triangles embedded in the design of the microfluidic devices. The cavitation phenomena were also studied using ethanol as the working fluid, so that the fluid behavior differences in the tested cavitation on chip devices were explained and compared. The employment of the wall roughness elements was an effective approach to optimize the performances of the devices. The experimental results exhibited entirely different flow patterns for ethanol compared to water, which suggests the dominant effect of the surface tension on hydrodynamic cavitation in microfluidic channels.

2019

The effect of pressure gradient on the collapse of cavitation bubbles in normal and reduced gravity

Marc Tinguely

When water flows through hydraulic turbomachines, the local pressure can become low enough to vaporize the water and create vapor cavities. This phenomenon is called cavitation. When the cavities collapse, shock waves and liquid jets traveling through the inclusions can erode nearby solid surfaces. The collapse of cavitation bubbles has been extensively investigated in the case of a single bubble in a liquid at rest. However, in the case of hydraulic machines, the bubbles collapse in a flowing liquid subject to strong pressure gradients. The objective of this thesis is thus to investigate the effect of the pressure gradient on the collapse of a spherical cavitation bubble. We have performed a preliminary investigation of bubble dynamics in a flowing liquid with a pressure gradient. To this end, we have placed a Naca0009 hydrofoil in the test section of EPFL High Speed Cavitation Tunnel and used a high energy pulsed laser focusing technique to generate a single vapor bubble close to the hydrofoil’s leading edge. We have observed a significant influence of the pressure gradient on the bubble dynamics. Particularly, if the collapse phase occurs near the minimum pressure point, the microjet is no more directed towards the solid surface but towards the lower pressure zone in the stream wise direction. We have also observed a peculiar feature of a cluster of bubble dynamics, which behaves almost similar to a single bubble, exhibiting a microjet during its collapse. These unprecedented re- sults are of major importance for a better understanding of the cavitation erosion mechanism in hydraulic systems. The qualitative results obtained in the cavitation tunnel led to the investigation of the effect of a constant pressure gradient on the collapse of the bubble. An experimental setup is built to observe the dynamics of the bubble in water, subject to the gravity induced hydrostatic pressure gradient, and to measure the pressure fluctuation due to the shock waves. The bubbles are generated with a high energy pulsed laser and recorded with a high speed camera. The experimental setup is taken onboard parabolic flights. The parabolic manoeuvres allow the gravity level to be varied in the plane, which modulates the intensity of the pressure gradient in the liquid. The high speed movies taken during the flights reveal that vapor jets appear with the rebound bubble. An empirical law for the prediction of the volume of the jet is deducted from the experimental results. The volume of the jet, normalized with the volume of the rebound bubble, is found to be proportional to a non dimensional parameter ζ0=|∇p|Rmax/Δp, where ∇p is the pressure gradient, Rmax is the maximal bubble radius and Δp is the driving pressure. This dependance is enforced by a theoretical development based on the concept of the Kelvin impulse. Moreover, we identify a threshold for the apparition of the vapor jet: ζ > 4 · 10 − 4 . A new approach for the study of the bubble collapse is proposed: we look at how the energy in the initial cavitation bubble is partitioned between the collapse channels, namely the rebound, the shock wave, the jet, and the luminescence. The microgravity phases of the parabolic flights prevent the apparition of the jet. The collapse of the bubble, in this case, is perfectly spherically symmetric. Moreover, the energy dissipated through luminescence is negligible. Therefore, the study reduces to the energy partition between rebound and shock wave. The measurements uncover a systematic pressure dependence of the energy partition between rebound and shock. We demonstrate that these observations agree with a physical model relying on a first-order approximation of the liquid compressibility and an adiabatic treatment of the non-condensable gas inside the bubble. Using this model, we find that the energy partition between rebound and shock is dictated by a single non-dimensional parameter ξ=Δp(γ^6)/(pg0^1γ)/(ρc^2)^(1−1/γ), where γ is the adiabatic index of the non-condensable gas, pg0 is the pressure of the non-condensable gas at the maximal bubble radius, ρ is the liquid density, and c is the speed of sound in the liquid.

EPFL2013

Hydraulic fracture growth in quasi-brittle materials

Dong Liu

Hydraulic fracturing is a technique often used in the oil and gas industry to enhance the production of wells in low-permeability reservoirs. It consists of fluid injection at a sufficiently large injection rate to create and propagate tensile fractures inside the rock formation. The growth of a hydraulic fracture is a highly non-linear moving boundary hydro-mechanical problem. Many physical processes get tightly involved and influence the fracture growth, such as the elastic deformation of the material, fracture surface creation, viscous fluid flow inside the propagating fracture, and fluid leak-off into the solid principally. The linear hydraulic fracture mechanics (LHFM) theory describes well this coupled process, with adequate comparisons between predictions and observations in the linear elastic medium. However, deviations from LHFM predictions have been reported at the laboratory and field scales in some cases, notably a larger fluid pressure and a shorter fracture length. These deviations are often associated with the non-linear nature of rock fracture deformation. However, the impact of these material non-linearities on the coupled problem of hydraulic fracture propagation has not been fully understood. In this context, this thesis investigates numerically and experimentally the effect of the quasi-brittle nature of rocks on hydraulic fracture growth. We first solve the propagation of a hydraulic fracture using a power-law fracture length-dependent fracture energy to model macroscopically the effect of an enlarging process zone. The use of Gauss-Chebyshev quadrature and barycentric Lagrange interpolation techniques reduces the hydraulic fracture propagation problem to a set of non-linear ordinary differential equations. We find that this increasing apparent toughness leads to a slower fracture growth compared with constant toughness LHFM solutions and a faster transition to the toughness dominated regime. We show that the solution can be approximated by the self-similar constant toughness solutions with the instantaneous toughness value. We then explore the impact of the quasi-brittle nature of rocks by using a cohesive zone model in combination with elastohydrodynamic lubrication to simulate HF growth. We notably account for fluid cavitation at the fracture tip and the effect of fracture roughness on flow. The fracture growth finally converges toward the LHFM predictions but deviate from LHFM predictions when the cohesive zone cannot be neglected. These deviations indicate an increase of energy dissipation. The additional energy dissipation compared with LHFM mainly comes from the viscous fluid flow in the rough fracture process zone and is larger for a larger ratio between the in-situ stress and the material peak cohesive stress. We finally discuss HF experiments performed on two impermeable rocks under different confinement and injection conditions. We notably develop an inversion technique to reconstruct the fracture front geometry using diffracted waves recorded via an array of 32 sources and 32 receivers. We find that transmitted waves attenuate before the arrival of the fracture front estimated from diffracted waves, indicating the existence of a fracture process zone of centimeters extent. This fracture process zone is found to be comparable with the fracture extent, thus implying an important artifact of laboratory HF experiments performed in quasi-brittle rocks on finite-size centimeter-decimeter samples.