Study on the rupture of liquid bridges in liquid-liquid two-phase coaxial flow

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Abstract Droplet formation is often encountered in many industrial processes and it is widely used in petrochemical, fine chemical, energy, food, biological pharmaceutical, and environmental protection. Compared with the traditional batch production mode, continuous droplet production based on liquid-liquid two-phase flow has simpler operation and higher product benefit, which receives more attentions. In liquid-liquid two-phase flow, a liquid bridge is formed when the dispersed phase forms the main droplet, and the liquid bridge shrinks into satellite droplet after rupture due to the surface tension. The volume of satellite droplet is usually one thousandth of the main droplet, so that the appearance of satellite droplet will lead to poor single dispersion of the droplet. In this paper, the formation and rupture process of the liquid bridge as well as the factors influencing the maximum length of the liquid bridge are studied by experiment and CFD method. A device is built to record the generation of droplets in the liquid-liquid coaxial flow using a high-speed camera. The liquid bridge formation and rupture process is recorded and the maximum liquid bridge length is obtained using the CFD calculation. The results show that the maximum length of the liquid bridge decreases when the capillary number increases. But the capillary number is not the only factor affecting the maximum length of the liquid bridge. It also related to the viscosity ratio of the two phases. When the viscosity ratio of the two phases increases, the shear force of the liquid bridge increases, while the maximum length of the liquid bridge decreases. The rupture process of the liquid bridge is closely related to the variation of velocity around the liquid bridge.

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	JIAO Boya
	GUO Kai
	LIU Hui
	LIU Chunjiang
	ZHENG Longyun
	ZHANG Yanan

Keywords： liquid-liquid two-phase flow coaxial flow liquid bridge high-speed camera computational fluid dynamics

Received 2022-04-20;

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JIAO Boya, GUO Kai, LIU Hui, LIU Chunjiang, ZHENG Longyun, ZHANG Yanan.Study on the rupture of liquid bridges in liquid-liquid two-phase coaxial flow[J] Chemcial Industry and Engineering, 2024,V41(4): 160-168

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