Formation of uniform liquid drops by application of vibration to laminar jets

Gel-sphere processes require the formation of liquid drops of controlled and uniform diameter with production rates of 10{sup 3}-10{sup 7} drops/min. In this paper, procedures and equipment are described that apply vibration to give a controlled breakup of laminar liquid jet streams into uniform drops. Criteria are also given for the selection of jet diameters, jet velocities, and vibrational frequencies and for the configuration of the apparatus to produce drops of 500-5000-{mu}m diameters. In this work, the standard deviations of product sphere diameters (based on the log-normal size distributions) were 1.01-1.05.