Viscous flows past spherical gas bubbles

Abstract

Computations of the steady viscous flow past a fixed spherical gas bubble are reported for Reynolds numbers in the range 0·1 [les ]R[les ] 200. Good agreement with Moore's (1963) asymptotic theory for the drag coefficient is obtained forR[les ] 40 and with the well-known small-Rtheory forR[les ] ½. The method of series truncation is used to reduce the problem to a nonlinear two-point boundary-value problem, which is then solved by an accurate and efficient finite-difference procedure.