Multiphase Flow Research with a Surfactant Lattice Boltzmann Model

Abstract

Surfactant-dependent rheologies of emulsions and surfactant-controlled droplet size distributions in turbulent flows were studied with 3D lattice Boltzmann simulations. We review the surfactant related aspects of the model, where the amphiphilic surfactant is treated as a continuous density and vector field. The free energy formulation of the model allows for thermodynamic interpretations of the model results.

GRAPHICAL ABSTRACT

Keywords:

• Amphiphilic surfactant
• dynamic interfacial tension
• Marangoni effect
• emulsion rheology
• Gibbs-Helmholtz free energy

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The work relied heavily on the following freeware: The Unix emulator Cygwin, MPICH (an implementation of the Message Passing Interface for parallel processing), the 3D visualization tool Visit, Ghostview, and the graphics tool Gimps.