4. Conclusion
Total gas holdups, aG, in a rectangular and a cylindrical bubble column were measured by using high-speed video images of the free surface in the column and an image processing method to investigate effects of the initial liquid height, H0, on aG. The hydraulic diameters, DH, of the columns were 200 mm. Air and water were used for the gas and liquid phases, respectively. A dimensionless group was deduced to correlate aG at various H0. An empirical correlation of aG in terms of the deduced dimension- less group was proposed. The conclusions obtained under the pre- sent experimental conditions are as follows:
(1) Experimental data of total gas holdups in the rectangular and cylindrical columns were systematically obtained for wide ranges of the superficial gas velocity, JG, and the initial liquid height, i.e. 0.025 6 JG 6 0.40 m/s and 1.5 6 H0 6 5.0, where H0 = H0/DH.
(2) Heterogeneous bubbly flows were formed in the present
experiments, i.e., bubbles of various sizes were present and
the rising motion of bubble swarms induced column-scale
vortical structures. The bubble size was smaller than DH
for J 6 0.15 m/s (regime 1), whereas huge bubbles of the G
column-width scale, which had strong wake entrainment and mixing effects, were formed for JG P 0.25 m/s (regime 2).
(3) The flow regime mainly depends on JG, whereas the height effect on the flow regime is small.
(4) The gradient of aG with respect to JG can be used as an indi- cator for flow regime identification: the indicator decreases with increasing JG in the flow regime without huge bubbles, whereas that becomes constant in the flow regime with huge bubbles.