Microbubble - A Unique Technology for Reducing the Drag of Wind Farm Vessel Services

Many experimental tests and model simulation research have been conducted previously in order to explore the potential of microbubbles in reducing the drag of vessels. However, different conclusions are drawn in different open literatures. In view of this, model simulation research is further conducted in this paper in order to seek the consensus on the influences of microbubble size, microbubble density, and microbubble initial velocity on drag reduction. From the model simulation results, it has been found that increasing microbubble density and their initial velocity will increase the local bubble volume fraction, thus increases drag reduction. However, the change of microbubble size will not influence drag reduction significantly. This research finding will be of very importance to the future design of low resistance wind farm service vessels.