Experimental investigations and modelling of breakage phenomena in stirred liquid/liquid systems

The design of stirred tanks for liquid/liquid dispersions usually requires expensive experimental investigations. Models for properties of the dispersion like drop size distribution or interfacial area as a function of power-input, material and process parameters are rare and poorly accurate. With the present experimental investigations of drop breakage processes it is shown, that the modelling of drop size distributions in stirred tanks is sensitive to daughter drop distributions. For the simulation common coalescence and breakage models as well as special daughter droplet distribution models from literature were applied and tested. An efficient commercial solver for the population balance equation (PBE), the program PARSIVAL((R)) (Wulkow et al., 2001) was used.