Bubble Formation at a Submerged Orifice in High-Speed Horizontal Oscillation

Reducing the cell size of aluminum foams is always a hot and difficult topic in the fabrication of aluminum foams by gas injection route. There lacks theoretical guidance for the bubble size reduction when foaming by the dynamic gas injection method. For the convenience of observation, the aqueous bubbles from small-sized orifice in the high-speed horizontal oscillation were investigated in this paper. A bubble formation and detachment model in the high-speed horizontal oscillation system was proposed. The high-speed system with horizontal simple harmonic oscillation could reduce the average bubble size of aqueous foam effectively. The regularity of bubble formation and the influence of experimental parameters on average bubble size can be predicted by the theoretical model, and the experimental results agree well with the theoretical calculation. The results have shown that bubbles generally detach from the orifice at deceleration periods of the simple harmonic oscillation, and there exist several fixed sizes of bubbles with the fixed experimental parameters due to the effects of periodic forces. The average bubble size decreases with the increase of oscillation frequency and amplitude, and it roughly increases with the increase of gas flow rate. Using the high-speed horizontal oscillation method to prepare aluminum foams, the cell size can be reduced to about 1 mm. Moreover, the cell sizes of aluminum foam can be well predicted by this theoretical model. (C) The Minerals, Metals & Materials Society and ASM International 2016