Pressure Wave Propagation in a Bubbly Medium: A Multiscale Modelling Approach

This work uses a compressible Eulerian multi-material solver with three modeling approaches to examine shock and pressure wave propagation in a bubbly medium. These approaches represent different levels of complexity from fully resolving the dispersed bubbles to treating the bubbly medium as a homogeneous mixture. An intermediate approach is based on treating bubbles as discrete singularities. Propagation of the pressure wave through the bubbly medium is compared between the simplified approaches and the fully resolved bubble simulation. Different scenarios demonstrating the effect of pressure amplitude, void fraction, and bubble size distribution are presented to further understand wave propagation in bubbly media.