- Letter
- Open Access
Beyond capillarity: Extended interfacial energy transfer in bubble-laden turbulence
Phys. Rev. Fluids 11, L102601 – Published 6 October, 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/5bj8-w4sb
Abstract
Capillary forces are commonly regarded as an energetically closed channel in multiphase turbulence, redistributing kinetic energy across scales without net gain or loss. Here, we show that this picture breaks down in bubble-laden turbulence when short-range near-contact interactions are active. A spectral analysis of the kinetic-energy budget reveals that the cumulative capillary power does not vanish at statistical stationarity, but instead retains a finite negative residual. This apparent imbalance is exactly compensated by the work of short-range repulsive forces, which is negligible at large and intermediate scales and becomes positive only at small scales. Near-contact interactions therefore open a distinct small-scale pathway in the interfacial energy transfer, rather than acting as a mere regularization of unresolved thin films. The proper scale-by-scale description is thus an extended interfacial transfer, combining capillary and near-contact work, rather than a purely capillary one.
Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)
Article Text
Supplemental Material
References (26)
- V. Mathai, D. Lohse, and C. Sun, Bubbly and buoyant particle–laden turbulent flows, Annu. Rev. Condens. Matter Phys. 11, 529 (2020).
- A. Montessori, M. Lauricella, A. Mukherjee, and L. Brandt, Breakdown of Kolmogorov scaling and modified energy transfer in bubble-laden turbulence, Phys. Rev. Fluids 11, 024605 (2026).
- S. Elghobashi, Direct numerical simulation of turbulent flows laden with droplets or bubbles, Annu. Rev. Fluid Mech. 51, 217 (2019).
- J. M. Mercado, D. C. Gómez, D. Van Gils, C. Sun, and D. Lohse, On bubble clustering and energy spectra in pseudo-turbulence, J. Fluid Mech. 650, 287 (2010).
- E. Alméras, V. Mathai, D. Lohse, and C. Sun, Experimental investigation of the turbulence induced by a bubble swarm rising within incident turbulence, J. Fluid Mech. 825, 1091 (2017).
- M. Crialesi-Esposito, S. Chibbaro, and L. Brandt, The interaction of droplet dynamics and turbulence cascade, Commun. Phys. 6, 5 (2023).
- A. Rivière, W. Mostert, S. Perrard, and L. Deike, Sub-Hinze scale bubble production in turbulent bubble break-up, J. Fluid Mech. 917, A40 (2021).
- F. Veron, Ocean spray, Annu. Rev. Fluid Mech. 47, 507 (2015).
- A. Angulo, P. van der Linde, H. Gardeniers, M. Modestino, and D. Fernández Rivas, Influence of bubbles on the energy conversion efficiency of electrochemical reactors, Joule 4, 555 (2020).
- P. Chandran, S. Bakshi, and D. Chatterjee, Study on the characteristics of hydrogen bubble formation and its transport during electrolysis of water, Chem. Eng. Sci. 138, 99 (2015).
- A. Bureiko, A. Trybala, N. Kovalchuk, and V. Starov, Current applications of foams formed from mixed surfactant–polymer solutions, Adv. Colloid Interface Sci. 222, 670 (2015).
- M. S. Dodd and A. Ferrante, On the interaction of Taylor length scale size droplets and isotropic turbulence, J. Fluid Mech. 806, 356 (2016).
- A. Montessori, M. Lauricella, N. Tirelli, and S. Succi, Mesoscale modelling of near-contact interactions for complex flowing interfaces, J. Fluid Mech. 872, 327 (2019).
- A. Montessori, M. R. Lisboa, M. Lauricella, and S. Succi, Adaptive near-contact repulsion in conservative Allen–Cahn phase-field lattice Boltzmann multiphase model, Transp. Phenom. 1, 20260088 (2026).
- L. Zhang, K. Peng, X. Shao, and J. Deng, Short-range repulsive force model for near-contact interactions of bubbles, Phys. Rev. E 106, 045110 (2022).
- T. Rajim, Y. Mezache, B. Di Pierro, and P. Trontin, A mesoscale Eulerian numerical method for short-range repulsion in interfacial dynamics, Int. J. Multiphase Flow 194, 105495 (2026).
- M. Lauricella, A. Mukherjee, L. Brandt, S. Succi, D. Izbassarov, and A. Montessori, ACCLB: A high-performance lattice Boltzmann code for multiphase turbulence on multi-GPU architectures, Procedia Comput. Sci. 267, 40 (2025).
- M. Lauricella, A. Tiribocchi, S. Succi, L. Brandt, A. Mukherjee, M. La Rocca, and A. Montessori, Thread-safe multiphase lattice Boltzmann model for droplet and bubble dynamics at high density and viscosity contrasts, Phys. Fluids 37, 072111 (2025).
- K. Singh and A. Komrakova, Comparison of forcing schemes to sustain homogeneous isotropic turbulence, Phys. Fluids 36, 015126 (2024).
- T. Dombre, U. Frisch, J. M. Greene, M. Hénon, A. Mehr, and A. M. Soward, Chaotic streamlines in the ABC flows, J. Fluid Mech. 167, 353 (1986).
- See Supplemental Material at http://link.aps.org/supplemental/10.1103/5bj8-w4sb for robustness tests of the near-contact energetic contribution, full kinetic-energy budget closure, the near-contact activity diagnostic, and additional details on the physical regime and dimensionless parameters.
- G. Huang, H. Hessenkemper, S. Tan, R. Ni, A. Sommer, A. D. Bragg, and T. Ma, Taylor dispersion of bubble swarms rising in quiescent liquid, J. Fluid Mech. 1014, R1 (2025).
- V. Mathai, Swarming bubbles stir and spread, J. Fluid Mech. 1020, F1 (2025).
- G. B. Deane and M. D. Stokes, Scale dependence of bubble creation mechanisms in breaking waves, Nature (London) 418, 839 (2002).
- V. Pandey, D. Mitra, and P. Perlekar, Turbulence modulation in buoyancy-driven bubbly flows, J. Fluid Mech. 932, A19 (2022).
- V. Pandey, D. Mitra, and P. Perlekar, Kolmogorov turbulence coexists with pseudo-turbulence in buoyancy-driven bubbly flows, Phys. Rev. Lett. 131, 114002 (2023).
