A novel gas inducing rotor-stator impeller was used to produce foam from viscous non-Newtonian shear thinning liquid and non-ionic surfactant Tween 80. Foam produced under various experimental conditions, was characterised based on the bubble size and foam half-life. Higher impeller speed and solution viscosity, resulted in smaller size bubbles and more stable foam. Higher gas hold-up is associated with reduction in bubble size and, longer mixing times resulted in increase in bubble size because of coalescence. Empirical models were developed to predict the foam bubble size and its half-life and a good correlation between the measured data and the predicted data was obtained (R² > 0.94). Foam bubble size was found to be a function of Reynolds number, mixing time number and Froude number. Foam half-life was found to be dependent on the same dimensionless number along with the Weber number. It is shown that, gas inducing impeller, can produce foam with similar properties at ambient conditions and with better process control, compared to foam produced by conventional agitation-based devices.

新型的气体诱导转子-定子叶轮用于由粘性非牛顿剪切稀化液体和非离子型表面活性剂Tween 80产生泡沫。根据气泡大小和泡沫半衰期对在各种实验条件下产生的泡沫进行了表征。叶轮速度和溶液粘度较高，导致气泡更小，泡沫更稳定。较高的气体滞留率与气泡尺寸的减小有关，较长的混合时间由于聚结而导致气泡尺寸的增加。建立了用于预测泡沫气泡大小及其半衰期的经验模型，并获得了测量数据与预测数据之间的良好相关性（R ²> 0.94）。发现泡沫气泡大小是雷诺数，混合时间数和弗洛德数的函数。发现泡沫半衰期取决于相同的无量纲数以及韦伯数。结果表明，与传统的基于搅动的装置产生的泡沫相比，引气叶轮可以在环境条件下产生具有类似特性的泡沫，并且具有更好的过程控制能力。