Experimental study on the film droplet production from a bubble burst on the free surface

Abstract

The aerosol released during a severe reactor accident may be retained in the liquid pool. During the venting stage of the suppression pool, bubbles generated in the pool will rise to the free surface and burst to generate droplets. The airflow re-entrains aerosols from the liquid to the air via droplets. Accurate evaluation of droplet entrainment needs to acquire the diameter and number of droplets generated by a bubble, so studying the various behaviors that affect the above parameters is necessary. In this paper, high-speed photography is used to visualize the phenomenon of a single bubble burst to generate film droplets in deionized water and TiO2 suspensions at different phase temperatures. Image processing is used to obtain the bubble film opening rate, the bubble burst position, the bubble lifetime, and the diameter and number of film droplets. The results show that the film thickness decays with time in a power law with a parameter of 2/3, and the newly defined film thickness also decays with time in a power law after considering the bubble radius and physical parameters. This rule is applicable in different liquid temperatures and solutes. Besides, the film thickness increases with liquid temperature and aerosol concentration; the bubble lifetime obeys the Weibull distribution, with the average bubble lifetime of deionized water varies non-monotonically with the liquid temperature, the average lifetime increase with aerosol concentration and liquid temperature in aerosol suspension; The average droplet diameter decreases with bubble lifetime in a power law with a parameter of 5/16, the droplet diameter distribution can be calculated by the gamma distribution of the normalized droplet diameter and the bubble lifetime, and in good agreement with the experimental data, the droplet entrainment factor can also be calculated from the critical droplet diameter and bubble lifetime, which decreases with bubble lifetime.