A Comparison of VoF based Numerical Scheme with a Single Air Bubble Dynamics in Quiescent Water within an Enclosure

This paper aims at comparative assessment of the different volume of fluid (VoF) based numerical schemes on analyzing the dynamics of a rising single bubble in a denser medium. For this purpose, a simple yet challenging problem in which bubble moves naturally under the action of gravity in quiescent water is considered. Experiments have revealed that achieving a terminal velocity of the upward moving bubble is not obvious. Besides the operating pressure, instabilities arising from the shape and size of a bubble in motion may be the guiding parameters. To numerically analyze the underpinning the three available numerical schemes viz. Upwind, Quadratic Upstream Interpolation for Convective Kinematics (QUICK) and Monotonic Upwind Scheme for Conservation Laws (MUSCL) schemes combined with the pressure-velocity coupling (p-v) approaches viz. Pressure Implicit with Splitting of Operators (PISO) and Semi Implicit Method for Pressure-Linked (SIMPLE) are considered. The computed values are used for analyzing the vortex shedding, path instability and shape deformation. This analysis allows us to conclude certain differences as a consequence of the nature of these schemes. The findings will be helpful in (a) analyzing the dynamics of bubble in a chain, (b) improving the involved approximations.