A review on bubble generation and transportation in Venturi-type bubble generators

Venturi-type bubble generators own advantages of simplicity in structure, high efficiency, low power consumption, and high reliability, exhibiting a broad application potential in various fields. This work presents a literature review of recent progress in the research concerning Venturi-type bubble generators, with a focus on the performance evaluation, bubble transportation, and breakup mechanisms. Experimental studies employing flow visualization techniques have played an important role in exploring the bubble transportation and breakup phenomena, which is vitally necessary for clarifying the bubble breakup mechanisms and understanding the working principle and performance of a Venturi channel as a bubble generator. A summarization was carried out on both experimental and theoretical work concerning parameters influencing the bubble breakup and the performance of Venturi-type bubble generators. Based on the geometric parameter optimization combined with appropriate flow conditions, it is expected that Venturi-type bubble generators can produce bubbles with controllable size and concentration to satisfy the application requirements, while a further work is required to illustrate the interaction between the liquid and gas bubbles.