Turbulent mixing drop breakup

The technological framework is plenty of emulsification approaches, mostly involving mixing two liquids in bulk processes, and many of them using turbulence to enhance drop breakup. 

Turbulent mixing covers a broad spectrum of applications beyond the field of reactions and reactor design, all of which are affected by the turbulence. Drop breakup, off-bottom solids suspension, gas dispersion, bulk blending, and heat transfer are all affected by the turbulent field. Without a better understanding of this part of the physics, it is difficult to make progress in these areas. With this broader objective clearly in mind, we now move forward to describe the key characteristics of turbulent flow. 

A1 Taweel, A. M., and L. D Walker (1997). Dynamics of drop breakup in turbulent flow, presented at Mixing XIV, 14th Biennial North American Mixing Conference, Williamsburg, VA, June. 

Almost all flows in chemical reactors are turbulent and traditionally turbulence is seen as random fluctuations in velocity. A better view is to recognize the structure of turbulence. The large turbulent eddies are about the size of the width of the impeller blades in a stirred tank reactor and about 1/10 of the pipe diameter in pipe flows. These large turbulent eddies have a lifetime of some tens of milliseconds. Use of averaged turbulent properties is only valid for linear processes while all nonlinear phenomena are sensitive to the details in the process. Mixing coupled with fast chemical reactions, coalescence and breakup of bubbles and drops, and nucleation in crystallization is a phenomenon that is affected by the turbulent structure. Either a resolution of the turbulent fluctuations or some measure of the distribution of the turbulent properties is required in order to obtain accurate predictions. 

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