Abstract ‘The fascinating behaviour of bubbles and drops rising or falling under gravity, even without the presence of any impurities or other forces (such as electric, magnetic and marangoni forces), is still a subject of active research. Let alone a unified description of the dynamics of bubbles and drops, a full description of a single bubble/drop is out of our reach, as of now. The thin skirted bubbles, for instance, may rise axisymmetrically or may have travelling waves in azimuthal or vertical direction; may of may not remain axisymmetric; may eject satellite bubbles, or they may form wrinkles in ‘their skirt. The length scales may vary actoss 3 or more orders of magnitude. A rising bubble may change its topology to become a toroidal bubble and become unstable to break into smaller bubbles, which may further break into even smaller bubbles. Bubbles which attain a terminal shape and velocity may change their final behaviour depending on the initial conditions of release. Ellipsoidal bubbles, released axisymmetrically, may often take a zigzag or a spiral path as they rise, On the other hand, drops have a completely different dynamics, Drops have been studied due to thelr importance in atomization, rain drop size distribution, emulsification and many other problems of industrial imaportance. Apart from the low Reynolds number regime and density ratios close to 1, any literature seldom compares bubbles and drops because of the inherent difference in their dynamics. ‘The reason for this difference has been investigated in the first part of this thesis, ‘We show that a bubble can be designed to behave like a drop in the Stokes flow Limit when the density of the drop is less than 1.2 times that of the outer fluid. It has been shown that Hadamaed’s exact solution for zero Reynolds number yields a better condition for equivalence between a bubble and a dzop than the Boussinesq condition. Scaling relationships have been derived for density ratios close to unity for equivalence at large inertia, Numerical simulations predict a similar equivalence for large inertia as well. For density ratios far fom unity, bubbles and drops are very different Axisymmetric numerical simulations show that the vorticity tends to concentrate in lighter fluid, ‘which manifests into a totally different dynamics for bubbles and drops. This is the reason for thin trailing end of the drops and thick base of bubbles, which result in a peripheral breakup of drops, but a central breakup of bubbles at large inertia and low surface tension. The three dimensional nature of the bubbles and drops has been studied next. We present ‘the results of one of the largest numerical study of three-dimensional rising bubbles and falling drops. We show that as the size of the bubble is increased, the dynamics goes through three abrupt transitions from one known class of shapes to another. A smaall bubble will attain an axially symmetric equilibrium shape dietated by gravity and surface tension, and travel vertically upwards at a terminal velocity thereafter. A bubble larger than a first critical size loses axial symmetry. We show that this can happen in two ways. Beyond the next eritieal size, it breaks up into a spherical eap and many satellite bubbles, and remarkably, the cap regains axial symmetry. Finally, a large bubble will prefer not to break up initially, but will change topologically to become an annular doughnut-like structure, which is perfectly axisymmetric. A central result of this work is to characterise the bubble motion according to their mode of asymmetry, and mode of breakup. Some preliminary results of three-dimensional drop simulations show that the effect of density ratio is to increase the inertia of the drop which changes the way a drop breaks up. The effect of viscosity ratio was found to delay the breakup of a drop. Also, this study confirms that a drop breaks up from the sides while a bubble breaks up from the center for high inertia and low surface tension. Next, we examined the buoyaney-driven rise of a bubble inside an infinite viscoplastic medium,assuming axial symmetxy. Our results indicate that in the presence of inertia and in the case of weak surface tension the bubble does not reach a steady state and the dynamics may become complex for sufficiently high yield stress of the material, Past researchers had assumed the motion to be steady or in the creeping low regime, whereas we show that for low surface tension and large vield stresses, ‘the bubble exhibits a periodic motion along with oscillations in bubble shape, These oscillations are explained by the periodic formation and destruction of an unyielded ring around the bubble Another physics often encountered in bubble/drop motion is that of heat transfer. A curious case is that of selfé-rewetting fluids which have been reported to increase the heat transfer rate significantly in heat-pipes. Rising bubble in a self-rewetting fluid with a temperature gradient imposed on the container walls has been studied. ‘To account for the non-monotonicity of surface tension we consider a quadratic dependence on temperature, We examine the Stokes flow limit fist and derive conditions under which the motion of a spherical bubble can be arrested in self-rewetting Auids even for positive temperature gradients. Our results indicate that for self-rewetting fluids, ‘the bubble motion departs considerably from the behaviour of ordinary fluids and the dynamics may become complex as the bubble crosses the position of minimum surface tension. Under certain cizcumstances, motion reversal and a terminal location is observed. The terminal location has been found to agree well with the analytical result obtained from the Stokes solution. Also, a taylor bubble is formed when the confinement is increased, thus implying a higher heat transfer rate to the gas slug inside the tube, Finally, the effect of evaporation in ambient conditions was examined. To this end, a phase. change model has been incorporated to gerris (open source fluid flow solver) in order to handle the complex phenomena occurring at the interface, We found that the vapour is generated more on ‘the regions of the interface with relatively high curvature, and the vapour generation increases with breakup of the drop. Furthermore, a competition between volatility and the dynamics governs the ‘vapour generation in the wake region of the drop. This is an ongoing work, and only a few results have been presented. vii