Effect of a downstream vertical wall on the rise regime of an isolated bubble: an experimental study

Abstract

This work experimentally investigates deformable nitrogen bubbles rising in ultrapure water and interacting with a vertical wall, focusing on how this downstream boundary alters their dynamics, an effect critical to many real-world processes. The experiments were conducted with a fixed Morton number, $Mo = 2.64 \times 10^{-11}$, with Bond, Galilei, and Reynolds numbers in the ranges $0.08 \lesssim Bo \lesssim 0.33$, $71 \lesssim Ga \lesssim 194$, and $132 \lesssim Re \lesssim 565$, respectively. The initial dimensionless horizontal distance between the wall and the bubble centroid was systematically varied, $0.3 \lesssim L \lesssim 5$, and the bubble trajectories from two orthogonal vertical planes were captured using high-speed imaging. While the bubble rising paths were stable without the wall presence for all the cases, the results reveal that wall proximity significantly affects the rising path, depending on $Bo$ (or $Ga$) and $L$. A map with four distinct interaction regimes and their transitions is obtained: (i) Rectilinear Path (RP) at low $Bo$ and large $L$, with negligible wall influence; (ii) Migration Away (MA) at higher $Bo$ and moderate-to-large $L$, with lateral deviation from the wall; (iii) Collision and Migration Away (C+MA) at high $Bo$ and small $L$, where bubbles first collide and then migrate away; and (iv) Periodic Collisions (PC) at low $Bo$, where repeated wall impacts occur due to competing forces. These findings bridge the gap between idealised simulations and practical systems, offering high-quality data to support and refine computational models of bubble-wall interactions in industrial and environmental applications.