The breakup of bubbles into jets during submerged gas injection

Abstract

There has never been any fundamental explanation presented for the transition from the bubbling regime to the jetting regime when gas is injected into liquid at high velocity through submerged tuyeres. This is an important issue in metallurgical processes, since the flow regime is known to influence refining rates, refractory erosion, and the penetration of the liquid into the tuyere. Based on the observation that many small droplets of liquid and gas bubbles are formed to create the jets, a combined Kelvin-Helmholtz and Rayleigh-Taylor instability analysis has been applied to bubbles forming at submerged tuyeres. For particular wavelengths of disturbances, the interface will be unstable and create bubbles and droplets. The critical injection velocity for instability depends on surface tension, tuyere diameter, and the gas-to-liquid density ratio, which can be summarized by We = 10.5(ρ*)^−1/2, where We is the Weber number based on the gas velocity and density and tuyere diameter, and ρ* is the gas-to-liquid density ratio. The importance of surface tension had not been appreciated previously for this regime of gas injection. There is considerable controversy in the literature concerning the measurement of the transition from bubbling to jetting. The 70 pct “linking” point, proposed by Ozawa and Mori, describes the situation where 70 pct of the bubbles link with the preceding bubbles and produce a reasonably steady jet. The theoretical correlation developed above predicts the velocity to reach this point ±20 pct (95 pct confidence level) in a variety of systems from six different groups of workers. The theoretical analysis demonstrates that the instabilities are primarily capillary in nature, not gravity waves, which explains the observation that orientation has little effect on the jetting transition.