The rise of bubbles in shear thinning viscoelastic fluids

Bubbles in a liquid rise under gravity and separate to the top. Bubbly liquids exist commonly in nature and play a significant role in energy-conversion, oil and chemical industries. Therefore, understanding how bubbles rise is of great importance. Rheological properties of the fluid have a strong impact on single bubble rise and have been shown to change collective bubble rise at low gas volume fractions significantly. We expect that a viscoelastic fluid can strongly modify the rise of bubbles in more concentrated suspensions. We generate bubbly liquids up to gas fractions of 30 %. We measure the bubble size and the rise velocity in micellar solutions made of cetyltrimethylammonium bromide (CTAB) and sodium salicylate (NaSal), a common system to create shear-thinning solutions. We show that when the NaSal concentration is small and the solutions are Newtonian, the bubble rise velocity decreases with increasing volume fraction of bubbles and the relationship between the two follows the Richardson-Zaki prediction. For the shear thinning viscoelastic solutions, the Richardson-Zaki relation no longer applies. Bubble clustering leads to faster rise velocities and a weaker dependence on the bubble volume fraction. At the largest concentration two rise regimes are observed. A fast one similar to that in the other shear thinning samples, followed by a very slow bubble rise. The slow rise velocity is attributed to the smallest bubbles rising so slowly, that at the shear rates around them, the fluid behaves as a Newtonian fluid. Therefore, bubble rise becomes again comparable to Stokes expectations. We also show that the peculiar dependence of the rise velocity with volume fraction of bubbles in the shear thinning viscoelastic solutions can have important implications in flotation as the area flux changes strongly with bubble volume fraction.