Optical imaging of MHD bubble flow in Hele-Shaw liquid metal cells

As a simple and affordable alternative to often prohibitively expensive or unavailable X-ray and neutron imaging, an improved optical imaging method for bubble flow in Hele-Shaw liquid metal cells is presented, enabling measurements with a significantly greater liquid metal layer thickness than previously reported. This enables studying bubble dynamics with varying degrees of geometric confinement, without or with applied magnetic field. The main principles and the experiment setup, as well as the necessary image/data processing pipeline are described, and preliminary results show that the proposed methods can be used to quantify the effects of varying gas flow rate and magnetic field configuration on bubble chain flow in a Hele-Shaw cell.