OBSERVATIONAL ANALYSIS OF BUBBLE PLUME IN TWO-LAYER DENSITY STRATIFIED WATER

The present study is conducted in water tank to observe the bubble plume behavior in homogeneous and two-layer density stratified waters. The bubble plumes images were garbed by employing the charged coupled detector. The digital image process techniques were applied to analyze the Images of the bubble plumes in different ambient water environments. Observational results show that the width of the bubble plume enlarges as increasing the air discharge rate from source. Increase of the width of bubble plume is more favorable to the aeration efficiency for water column. The larger the ambient water density is, the wider the width of the bubble plume becomes. As increasing the density difference between two layers of water, the intrusion length of bubble plume becomes longer. When the water depths of the two layers are equal, the intrusion length of bubble plume is found to be the longest.