Numerical study of bubbly two-phase flow under magnetic field effect by using Level set method

In this paper, effect of magnetic field on a bubble within two-phase bubbly flow studied by using a Level Set method. Two-phase flows under effect of external fields especially magnetic field have a wide range of medicine and engineering applications, such as magneto hydrodynamic problems (MHD), gas and oil facilities, fusion nuclear reactors, nuclear diagnose and medicine, MHD power plant, and etc. Magnetic field studied in this research is uniform in the entire of flow field. Dielectric fluids like air and water are used as the media fluids. As magnetic field induces magnetic force only on the interface of two phases and the bulk of two phases does not affected by magnetic field; so the magnetic force which acts on interface can be interpreted as a magnetic surface tension in this case. This force causes shape deformation of the bubble interface. In this study, SIMPLE algorithm based on the Finite Volume Method was used for solving of the flow field and the Finite Difference Method was applied for solving the magnetic field equations, respectively. Also, Level-Set method was applied for tracking the interface of the bubble and the fluid surrounding it. The results of this study show that applied magnetic field increases the rise velocity of bubbles and deforms its shape. Thus, this conclusion can be well applied to flow properties change and heat transfer rate enhancement.