Reduced-Order Modeling of Diffusive Effects on the Dynamics of Bubbles

The Rayleigh-Plesset equation and its extensions have been used extensively to model spherical bubble dynamics, yet radial diffusion equations must be solved to correctly capture damping effects due to mass and thermal diffusion. The latter are too computationally intensive to implement into a continuum model for bubbly cavitating flows, since the diffusion equations must be solved at each position in the flow. The goal of the present research is to derive a reduced-order model that accounts for thermal and mass diffusion. Motivated by results of applying the Proper Orthogonal Decomposition to data from full radial computations, we derive a model based upon estimates of the average heat transfer coefficients. The model captures the damping effects of the diffusion processes in two ordinary differential equations, and gives better results than previous models.