Experimental investigation of liquid-liquid system drop size distribution in Taylor-Couette flow and its application in the CFD simulation

Liquid-liquid systems are widely used in the several industries such as food, pharmaceutical, cosmetic, chemical and petroleum. Drop size distribution (DSD) plays a key role as it strongly affects the overall mass and heat transfer in the liquid-liquid systems. To understand the underlying mechanisms single drop breakup experiments have been done by several researchers in the Taylor-Couette flow; however, most of those studies concentrate on the laminar flow regime and therefore, there is no sufficient amount of data in the case of in turbulent flows. The well-defined pattern of the Taylor-Couette flow enables the possibility to investigate DSD as a function of the local fluid dynamic properties, such as shear rate, which is in contrast to more complex devices such as stirred tank reactors. This paper deals with the experimental investigation of liquid-liquid DSD in Taylor-Couette flow. From high speed camera images we found a simple correlation for the Sauter mean diameter as a function of the local shear employing image processing. It is shown that this correlation holds for different oil-in-water emulsions. Finally, this empirical correlation for the DSD is used as an input data for a CFD simulation to compute the local breakup of individual droplets in a stirred tank reactor.