A Model of Gas Bubble Growth by COMSOL Multiphysics

B. Chinè[1,2], and M. Monno[1,3]
[1]Laboratorio MUSP, Macchine Utensili e Sistemi di Produzione, Piacenza, Italy
[2]Instituto Tecnològico de Costa Rica, Escuela de Ciencia e Ingenierìa de Materiales, Cartago, Costa Rica
[3]Politecnico di Milano, Dipartimento di Meccanica, Milano, Italy
Published in 2010

We use COMSOL Multiphysics to model a gas bubble expansion in a viscous liquid initially at rest, a very common system for lightweight foamed materials from metal production and polymer processing. Modelling and simulation of foam processing during the production step involves many complexities, mainly due to the coupled momentum, mass and energy transport mechanisms, presence of more phases in the system and random character of the phenomena. The numerical results of the computational model compared well with analytical solutions from literature and obtained for a few simple cases. This first computational work is a basis for considering successive more realistic foam expansions.