Most of industrial plants such petrochemical plant, LNG plant, and power plant, usually use water for the process cooling. Especially, in a large industrial plant, a large amount of seawater is used as the cooling media, and finally discharged to sea area through a seawater discharge basin. The seawater discharge basin has a weir to keep the sufficient backpressure of the seawater cooling system. In the seawater discharge basin, the seawater overflows the weir and falls down into the seawater flow at the downstream of weir. Then, the air is entrained into the seawater at the downstream of weir due to the waterfall flow and air bubbles with various sizes and shapes are generated in seawater. From the viewpoint of an environmental conservation, it is often required to eliminate air bubbles contained in cooling seawater discharged from industrial plants to sea area. There is a de-aeration chamber as a technology to separate these bubbles from the discharged seawater. To perform the optimum design of the de-aeration chamber, it is important to grasp the volume and size distribution of air bubbles generated in the seawater by the waterfall flow at the weir, and a terminal velocity of air bubbles rising in seawater. Therefore, in this study, the terminal velocities of any bubble in swarm of air bubbles rising in stagnant seawater, were measured in the region of low void fraction.
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