Film Thickness Studies of Viscous Taylor Droplet Flow

This reported work studies the dynamics of a moderately viscous Taylor droplet in a 500 μm diameter circular microchannel. The focus is on the dynamics within the visco-inertial regime, and the study is performed numerically using the isoAdvector volume of fluid available in OpenFOAM v2012. A 2D axisymmetric domain is chosen and validated against experimental results in the visco-inertial regime from the literature. Taylor droplets of viscosity ratio (defined as dispersed phase to continuous phase) in the range of 0.5 to 5 are considered. The influence of the viscosity ratio on the droplet velocity, film velocity, internal circulation within the droplet, and film thickness is analyzed. A new film thickness equation is proposed for the visco-inertial regime. The proposed equation accurately predicts the present study and performs well with the available experimental film thickness data from the literature.