Three-dimensional measurement of void fraction in a bubble plume using statistic stereoscopic image processing

Abstract

A method for measuring the instantaneous 3-D bubble distribution in bubbly flows is proposed by making use of stereoscopic image processing. The method applies to the case of higher rather than dilute void fractions, because it is based on the following two statistic-based procedures. The first process is to obtain the 2-D distribution of local void fraction from visualized images, where a correlation between the bubble shadow fraction and the projection void fraction is derived by introducing the new idea of overlapping probability of the bubble-images under various conditions. The second process is to reconstruct the 3-D distribution of the local void fraction. In this step, a logical method is proposed in order to obtain the bubble-existence probability function which simultaneously satisfies the two distributions of the two projection void fractions. The present method is applied for instantaneous measurement of the 3-D structure of a bubble plume. The measured results show its particular structure, such as the hollow distribution of the bubbles, and the local spiral structure, which cannot be captured by point-measurement experiments.