Design and experimental investigation of an internal mixing twin-fluid atomiser for the generation of test aerosol particles

Internal mixing twin-fluid atomiser is known to be one of the prominent atomisers for the generation of spray or spray-like dispersion from bulk liquids. This paper designs and investigates the performance of a customised liquid siphon type internal mixing twin-fluid atomiser for the generation of test aerosol particles from oleic acid in an ethyl alcohol solution. Experimental results show the effect of airflow rate on suction height and liquid consumption rate of the atomiser with different design parameters. Variation of suction height and liquid consumption rate are investigated for six different design atomisers by varying the airflow rate between 18 and 230 lpm. It is seen that the atomiser with optimum design can have a suction height of up to 103 cm and a liquid consumption rate of up to 1545 ml/h. Atomiser 3 (with air inlet diameter = 18 mm and liquid jet diameter = 2 mm) produces better test aerosol participles with constant S/D = 0.66 and 10% solution concentration. While using this atomiser for the production of test aerosol, the lowest geometric standard deviation found in the experiment was 1.2.