Scale-dependent anisotropy, energy transfer and intermittency in bubble-laden turbulent flows

Data from Direct Numerical Simulations of disperse bubbly flows in a vertical channel are used
to study the effect of the bubbles on the carrier-phase turbulence. We developed a new method,
based on an extension of the barycentric map approach, that allows to quantify and visualize the
anisotropy and componentiality of the flow at any scale. Using this we found that the bubbles
significantly enhance anisotropy in the flow at all scales compared with the unladen case, and
that for some bubble cases, very strong anisotropy persists down to the smallest scales of the
flow. The strongest anisotropy observed was for the cases involving small bubbles. Concerning
the energy transfer among the scales of the flow, our results indicate that for the bubble-laden
cases, the energy transfer is from large to small scales, just as for the unladen case. However,
there is evidence of an upscale transfer when considering the transfer of energy associated with
particular components of the velocity field. Although the direction of the energy transfer is the
same with and without the bubbles, the behaviour of the energy transfer is significantly modified
by the bubbles, suggesting that the bubbles play a strong role in altering the activity of the
nonlinear term in the flow. The skewness of the velocity increments also reveal a strong effect of
the bubbles on the flow, changing both its sign and magnitude compared with the single-phase
case. We also consider the normalized forms of the fourth-order structure functions, and the
results reveal that the introduction of bubbles into the flow strongly enhances intermittency in the
dissipation range, but suppresses it at larger scales. This strong enhancement of the dissipation
scale intermittency has significant implications for understanding how the bubbles might modify
the mixing properties of turbulent flows.