Fluid Property Adjustment of Water-Ethanol Mixture for the Application of Metal Foam Production

Abstract

In this paper, a case study is performed for the possibility of using water ethanol mixture in predicting the bubble behavior in multiphase flow. The study compares the concept of formation of foam at the surface of the mixture with the procedure of producing aluminum foam by direct gas injection. Material properties such as kinematic viscosity, density and surface tension on the foaming process will be studied experimentally, while the foam bubble size will be studied by means of digital image processing. Finally the path of the bubble from the nozzle to the liquid surface shall be simulated by means of computational fluid dynamics software and verified experimentally by the usage of a speed camera. Acquirement of this practical knowledge can improve the effectiveness of the real foaming process of the aluminum and aluminum alloys. Simultaneously, it helps to understand main basic features of the formed metal foams. The study is meant to define the best parameters for the foaming process for water-ethanol mixture. Such results are to be compared to their corresponding parameters for the direct injection foaming method for aluminum. The main aim to be able to correlate the 2 processes, in means to decreasing time and cost required to produce aluminum metal foam through test trials, usually causing the waste of material, fuel and energy. Furthermore, the quality and quantity evaluation of the created foam is presented. The effect of the flow rate of the quality of foams can be observed experimentally. The theoretical calculation can reproduce the bubble dynamics observed experimentally.