Physical Modeling of Bubble Screens

Bubble screens have long been used for a variety of purposes, ranging from control of stratification, density currents, oil spills, shoaling, icing and wave heights, to inducing artificial mixing for augmentation of convective heat and mass transfer rates, aeration and water quality control. Dimensional and similitude considerations have been employed to develop the necessary requirements for physical modeling of such screens. This led to the development of a set of scaling relationships, into which a scale factor was introduced to account for distortion of similitude requirements. The scaling relationships were also found to depend on a densimetric Froude number representing source strength. These permit transposition of model results to field scale.