| Modeling the phenomenon of bubble growth in liquids is important to fields such as boiling, cavitation, bubble removal during glass making, micro-gravity studies, composite materials, manufacturing void-free high performance materials, measuring the elongational viscosity and polymer processing. The main objective of this thesis is to develop improved models to predict bubble growth in a liquid shell using the previously developed models based on approximate polynomial profiles. Earlier models concentrated on obtaining solutions for growth of a bubble surrounded by an infinite amount of liquid. These models do not represent the correct physics of the problem as the bubbles are in fact surrounded by a finite shell of liquid and there is a finite amount of gas dissolved in the liquid. To incorporate the correct physics in the problem the new models are developed. In these new models the previously used numerical technique of ‘Integral method’ was retained. This method allows us to formulate approximate solutions for bubble growth. Since the polynomial profiles approximations give reasonable results during initial times, they were retained to develop a better solution for the bubble growth. The new models developed were solved and compared with the approximate solutions for bubble growth in an infinite medium and also the solutions obtained by solving the full diffusion equation. After comparing the results it was found that the new models predict the bubble growth behavior reasonably well. |
