Abstract
Surfactants known as frothers are widely used in froth flotation to produce small bubbles and stabilize the froth, meanwhile, froth stability plays an important role in determining the product grade and recovery achieved from a mineral flotation process, and therefore it is of great significance to study the effect of surfactant on foam properties. However, foam properties, especially foam stability concerning liquid content of foam and evolution of bubble size, in flotation has received little attention. In this study, we intensively investigated the foamability and foam stability of different concentration cetyltrimethylammonium bromide (CTAB) solutions. Experiments were carried out using a commercially available instrument, Foam Scan, which determined simultaneously the foaming time, foam volume, the liquid content of foam and bubble size distribution. Particularly, the evolution of bubble size can be allowed to determine at a regular time interval. The results showed that as an increase in CTAB concentration, the foamability continuously increased till reached a constant at a critical micelle concentration (CMC), however, the foam stability initially increased and then presented a little decrease when the tested concentrations were larger than its CMC. An argument based on foam drainage, bubble coalescence and coarsening processes is proposed to account for the effect of CTAB concentration foam properties.
Highlights
Foam stabilized by surfactant, is a two–phase system consisting of gas bubbles separated by three–dimensional water channels where the liquid constantly drains and the water film between the bubbles thins [1,2,3,4], which can be encountered in many engineering applications such as mineral flotation, dust control, tertiary oil recovery, food industry, wastewater treatment, firefighting, personal care products, and so forth [5,6,7,8]
We investigated the effect of cetyltrimethylammonium bromide (CTAB) concentration on foamability and foam stability
It clearly shows that the surface tension initially decreases with increasing CTAB concentration as CTAB molecules adsorb at the air–solution interface, reaches a stable region when the tested concentrations exceed to a critical micelle concentration (CMC) which results in a break point in the curve and a plateau
Summary
Foam stabilized by surfactant, is a two–phase system consisting of gas bubbles separated by three–dimensional water channels where the liquid constantly drains and the water film between the bubbles thins [1,2,3,4], which can be encountered in many engineering applications such as mineral flotation, dust control, tertiary oil recovery, food industry, wastewater treatment, firefighting, personal care products, and so forth [5,6,7,8]. Many methods have been proposed to test and evaluate the foam performance of frother These methods can be classified as traditional methods and modern methods. The traditional methods only focus on the foam volume or foam height (foamability) and foam lifetime (foam stability), and neglect other important foam properties, such as the evolution of bubble size and liquid content of foam. We investigated the effect of CTAB concentration on foamability (i.e., foaming time) and foam stability (i.e., the evolution of liquid content of foam (drainage process) and evolution of bubble size (bubble coalescence and coarsening processes) using the modern foam performance testing method, Foam Scan method
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