论文部分内容阅读
Oil coating applications are found in many industries for lubrication, cooling, and corrosion prevention as well as spraying edible oils for food preparation. Spraying oil by conventional hydraulic and air-assisted nozzles can present issues with overspray and uneven application. Electrostatic atomization provides an alternative method to spray oils and other electrically insulating fluids utilizing the repulsive force of like charges instead of fluid and air pressure. This type of nozzle only works with small orifices and therefore, is limited on flow rate. A multi-orifice nozzle is a means of increasing the flow rate for an electrostatic atomization nozzle. The primary focus of this study is to characterize the spray plume of a multi-orifice, electrostatic atomization nozzle spraying pure soybean oil. Electrical performance studies were performed for a single- and three-orifice nozzles to compare how the number of orifices affects the electric charge injection into the oil. It was found that increasing from a single- to a three-orifice nozzle did not affect the total current injected but did reduce the spray specific charge of the oil exiting the nozzle. The three-orifice nozzle was studied further with a high speed camera, PDI and LSI systems to characterize the shape, drop size and velocity profile of the overall spray plume. It was observed that the individual spray plumes repel each other close to the nozzle and eventually mix to generate a single overall spray pattern at a spray distance of z/d≥1000 from the nozzle. In the middle of a single spray plume, the volume mean diameter was 0.8 ≤D/d ≤ 1.0 where D is the droplet diameter and d is the orifice diameter. Between the individual spray plumes, the same range of volume mean diameters is measured after mixing of the spray plumes occurs. The three orifice configuration proved effective at tripling the flow rate of the nozzle while providing a wide full cone spray pattern. It did reduce the maximum spray specific charge of the spray plume and resulted in a less stable operation of the nozzle.