A research team led by Cha Su Song, a researcher at the Nano Physics Engineering Institute, has developed an axial flow microbubble generator capable of adjusting bubble size.
Microbubbles can improve water quality and increase the dissolved oxygen content in water, not only because they are very slow to rise in water and they have high solubility and strong surface adsorption capacity, but also because radicals are produced when they collapse.
The microbubble generation system consists of a water pump, a venturi and an axial flow microbubble generator.
Through the venturi tube installed at the pump inlet flows a mixture of water and air, and when the air–water mixture fluid passes through an axial flow microbubble generator, microbubbles are produced at the generator outlet.
In the microbubble generation system, an air adjusting valve adjusts the flow rate of air sucked into the venturi, and the adjusting valve installed at the outlet of the pump adjusts the bubble size by controlling the internal pressure and flow rate of the mixture inside the generator.
The axial flow microbubble generator consists of a stator and a rotor with shear blades, and the rotor rotates at 8 500rpm to generate microbubbles.
The gap between the stator and the rotor of the generator is 0.3mm.
Through a simulation on the flow rate and bubble generation of a gas–liquid mixing fluid passing through the generator by a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) method, they determined reasonable structural parameters.
The presence of microbubbles produced by this device in water increases bioactivity and metabolic functions of living things and promotes their growth. In addition, they exhibit bactericidal effects and viral inactivation effects depending on the kind of gases that form microbubbles. It can be widely applied in the sectors of public health, agriculture, foodstuff industry, biotechnology and environmental protection,
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