Dispersed liquid-liquid systems are quite common in different industries, for example, the chemical, pharmaceutical, food, and petroleum industries. The droplet size is determined by equilibrium between various mechanisms of fluid particle breakage and coalescence. These mechanisms depend on system properties, surface chemistry, operating conditions, and flow phenomena.  The current understanding and thus the predictability of these processes are not sufficient to enable efficient design and reliable operation of the separator units.

This project studies the droplet breakage mechanism with the ultimate goal of improving the model prediction accuracy on droplet size distribution from population balance equations (PBE). The single droplet breakage process in turbulent flow is experimentally investigated via high-speed imaging technique (in collaboration with another SUBPRO project on Experiments on Fluid Particle Breakage). Reliable image processing is needed to analysis the experimental data and an image processing program which is tailored to our specific problem and be able to achieve full automation of image analysis is being developed. The experimental data will be used to evaluate the existing droplet breakage models to shed some light on the applicability of different droplet breakage models.