CFD Study of the Effect of a Fluid Flow in a Channel on Generation of Oil-in-Water Emulsion Droplets in Straight-Through Microchannel Emulsification

JOURNAL OF CHEMICAL ENGINEERING OF JAPAN

Isao Kobayashi¹  Kunihiko Uemura¹  Mitsutoshi Nakajima¹ 

[1]National Food Research Institute

关键词: Straight-Through Microchannel;    Emulsification;    CFD;    Droplet Generation;    Fluid Flow;   

DOI  :  10.1252/jcej.39.855

来源: Maruzen Company Ltd

【 摘 要 】

References(40)Cited-By(9)Straight-through microchannel (MC) emulsification enables formulating monodisperse emulsions using a channel array vertically microfabricated on a plate surface (a straight-through MC). This study investigated the effect of the fluid flow in a channel on the generation of soybean oil-in-water emulsion droplets from an elliptic channel using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). The visualized CFD results demonstrated that droplets with diameters of 32 to 38 μm were stably generated from the channel below the critical flow velocity of the to-be-dispersed phase (Ud). Above the critical Ud, we observed a drastic increase of the resultant droplet diameter. The calculated droplet generation rate achieved a maximum value of about 15 droplets per second at the critical Ud. An analysis of the neck formed inside the channel during droplet generation explained why the droplet generation behavior from the channel drastically changes over the critical Ud. The CFD results obtained in this study were confirmed by our experimental results reported in the literature.

【 授权许可】

Unknown