Characteristics of Swirl Effervescent Atomizer Spray Angle

In the application of sprays produced by an atomizer, spray angle is one of key performance parameters. A larger spray angle is often required in providing a better spray dispersion. Swirl effervescent atomizer is one of the existing atomizers with the capability to produce a large spray angle. The formation of spray angle from this atomizer however is hardly understood. A newly-designed swirl effervescent atomizer was developed and tested with different swirl-generating vane angle in order to understand the swirl intensity effect on the spray angle. Experiments were carried out based on a cold flow test approach using water as the working fluid and nitrogen gas as the atomizing agent. High-speed shadowgraph technique was deployed to record the resultant sprays produced. Video recordings, acquired using a high-speed video camera, were converted to a sequence of images for further analysis using an image processing software. It was found that the spray angle increases with the swirl-generating vane angle. Specifically, the spray angle shows an abrupt increase for the case of swirl-generating vane angle changing from 30° to 45° but visualizes only a gradual increase in the case of swirl-generating vane angle changing from 45° to 60°.