Experimental study on the differences between bubble and drop breakages in agitated turbulent flows

Abstract

The available experimental data focusing on the differences between bubble and drop breakages are still scarce in the literature. This work conducts the experiments of single bubble and single drop breakages in agitated turbulent flows. The effects of fluid particle size and agitation speed on daughter fragment number, breakage time, breakage probability, breakage frequency, and daughter size distribution (DSD) are analyzed. The breakage frequencies of bubble and drop show the monotonic and non‐monotonic variation trends with increasing fluid particle size, respectively. The variations of bubble and drop DSDs exhibit opposite trends, the probability of equal‐sized breakage of bubble increases while that of drop decreases when agitation speed or fluid particle size increases. These different trends cannot be predicted by most of the existing models simultaneously. The processes of elongation and internal flow redistribution during deformation may be the important factors causing these differences.