Experimental investigations on the lift force for turbulent flows with low Morton number

The lateral lift force has an important influence on the gas distribution in bubbly flows. For this reason reliable closure models reflecting this force are required for CFD-simulations of bubbly flows. In Direct Numerical Simulations as well in experimental investigation it was shown that the lift force strongly depends on the bubble size and even changes its sign depending on the bubble size. Tomiyama et al. (2002) obtained a correlation from experiments with single bubbles in a linear laminar shear flow for high Morton number systems, which is frequently used in CFD-simulations. In this work the lift force is determined experimentally in low Morton number systems with a turbulent background flow. Single bubbles move through a linear shear field generated in a flat column by asymmetric aerating. An averaged bubble trajectory is obtained from a long-term averaged gas volume fraction field along which the force balance including buoyancy, drag, virtual mass and lift is solved to determine the lift force coefficient. The additional parameters required, as relative velocity are obtained from the experiments. The dependency of the lift force coefficient on the horizontal bubble diameter is in good agreement with the data obtained by Tomiyama et al., however the Wellek correlation for the aspect ratio seems to be not valid for the pure system considered.