— NEWCASTLE UPON TYNE, United Kingdom — The 19th UK National Heat Transfer Conference (UKHTC 2026), held at Newcastle University, brought together researchers to discuss convection, two-phase flow, boiling and evaporation, electronics cooling, and artificial intelligence in heat transfer.
The conference highlighted research areas that require a deeper understanding of transient interfacial phenomena. In boiling and gas-liquid two-phase flows, bubble nucleation, growth, coalescence, breakup and departure are closely coupled with local fluid motion, phase change and interfacial heat transfer.
However, conventional temperature and pressure measurements alone cannot fully resolve these rapidly evolving processes.
High-speed cameras, combined with quantitative bubble measurement techniques, provide an experimental approach for capturing transient bubble dynamics and converting image sequences into physical data for heat transfer analysis.
From High-Speed Imaging to Quantitative Bubble Measurement
High-speed cameras enable researchers to capture bubble evolution with sufficient temporal and spatial resolution. Reliable bubble measurement, however, requires more than image acquisition.
Image processing and tracking algorithms must identify individual bubbles, separate overlapping contours, and extract geometric and kinematic parameters, including equivalent diameter, projected area, position, velocity and motion trajectories.
Dense bubbly flows present additional challenges. Small bubble sizes, low image contrast, overlapping interfaces and rapid motion can cause detection errors and incorrect trajectory associations.
To address these challenges, Revealer has developed a bubble measurement approach incorporating a heterogeneous dual-branch neural network.
The architecture combines high-resolution feature extraction with contextual analysis to identify bubble boundaries and distinguish individual objects in complex images. An optimal-transport-based algorithm supports multi-object tracking across successive frames.
By integrating high-speed cameras with bubble measurement software, researchers can convert visual observations into quantitative datasets for bubble dynamics analysis, two-phase flow characterization and model validation.
Experimental Applications: Revealer High-Speed Cameras in Bubble Dynamics Research
Three independent research studies illustrate how Revealer high-speed cameras and bubble measurement techniques support investigations involving phase change, boiling heat transfer and gas-liquid two-phase flows.
Rapid Depressurization: Measuring Bubble Growth and Interfacial Heat Transfer
Researchers at Chongqing University employed a Revealer high-speed camera integrated with synchronized pressure and temperature acquisition to investigate transient bubble growth during rapid depressurization.
Operating at 1280 × 1024 pixels and 6,800 frames per second, the camera captured bubble evolution over approximately 30 milliseconds.
Under a representative condition, a bubble evolved from a nearly spherical shape into ellipsoidal and cap-shaped configurations, while its projected equivalent diameter increased from approximately 0.6 mm to 2.8 mm.
The researchers extracted the time-dependent bubble growth radius from high-speed images and combined it with synchronized thermal measurements.
Using an energy conservation approach, they calculated the interfacial heat transfer coefficient and established a correlation for the investigated depressurization conditions.
The experiment demonstrates how high-speed cameras and bubble measurement provide essential experimental inputs for quantitative interfacial heat transfer analysis.
Figure: Revealer high-speed camera records bubble growth from 0 to 30 milliseconds during rapid depressurization for quantitative bubble measurement and heat transfer analysis.
Saturated Pool Boiling: Evaluating Bubble Growth Models
A research team at Tsinghua University used a Revealer G820_Pro high-speed camera to investigate bubble nucleation, growth, coalescence and departure during saturated pool boiling.
The camera recorded images at 4096 × 2048 pixels and 1,000 frames per second, with temperature measurements providing additional thermal information.
The experiments revealed significant variations between successive bubble growth cycles, even at the same nucleation site. Individual growth curves exhibited fluctuations of up to approximately 30%.
After approximately 20 growth cycles were included in the statistical analysis, fluctuations in the mean growth curve decreased to around 5%.
The researchers integrated their observations with additional experimental data to establish a dataset containing more than 2,000 points across a wide range of operating conditions.
They evaluated 16 existing bubble growth models and correlations and developed predictive correlations for different Jakob number ranges.
The findings demonstrate the importance of high-speed imaging, multi-cycle bubble measurement and statistical analysis in validating bubble growth models.
CSBG: Measuring Bubble Size Distributions in Two-Phase Flows
Researchers at Shanghai Jiao Tong University investigated a Continuous Spectrum Bubble Generator (CSBG) using a Revealer high-speed camera and two-phase flow measurement technology.
Image segmentation, overlapping-bubble identification and contour fitting were used to determine bubble size distributions under different operating conditions.
The experiments showed that increasing impeller rotational speed intensified large-bubble breakup and reduced mean bubble size.
At higher rotational speeds, the bubble size distribution approached a lognormal distribution.
The researchers further established empirical relationships between Sauter mean diameter (SMD), impeller rotational speed and superficial gas velocity.
Although the CSBG study did not directly measure boiling heat transfer, it demonstrates how high-speed cameras and quantitative bubble measurement can characterize bubble populations and provide experimental data for gas-liquid two-phase flow modeling.
Toward Integrated Multiphysics Measurement
Research areas represented at UKHTC 2026 indicate increasing demand for experimental methods capable of resolving transient interfaces and local physical parameters.
Integrating high-speed cameras and bubble measurement with particle image velocimetry (PIV), temperature field measurement and synchronized data acquisition could enable researchers to correlate bubble dynamics with surrounding flow structures and thermal conditions.
Such measurements can provide more comprehensive experimental datasets for investigating the coupling between bubble behavior and heat transfer.
By transforming transient bubble images into measurable physical parameters, Revealer high-speed cameras and bubble measurement technology support the progression of experimental heat transfer research from visual observation toward quantitative analysis, statistical characterization and model validation.
Contact Info:
Name: Harrison Shawn
Email: Send Email
Organization: HF Agile Device Co., Ltd.
Website: http://www.revealerhighspeed.com
Release ID: 89203472
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