BEHAVIOR OF A BUBBLE IN DIELECTRIC LIQUID IN UNIFORM AND NON-UNIFORM ELECTRIC FIELDS

We simulated the behavior of vapor and gas–vapor bubbles in dielectric liquid under the action of an electric field. The thermal multiphase lattice Boltzmann method was used to calculate the fluid dynamics. After applying the electric voltage, the bubble was deformed. In the uniform field (in which electrodes occupied all of the boundaries), the bubble was elongated along the direction of the average electric field and the degree of deformation was then calculated, which was close to experimentally obtained results. When the electrodes were smaller than the size of the computational domain, the field was non-uniform. The field magnitude was higher between the electrodes and decreased outside of the electrodes. In this case, the bubble was stretched in the direction normal to the electric field due to the forces acting on the inhomogeneous dielectric fluid. Moreover, for sufficiently small electrodes, the bubble escaped outside of the electrodes. This type of interesting behavior has been previously observed in experiments of Korobeynikov et al.