Identification of droplet breakage kernel for population balance modelling

This paper describes a procedure to acquire and process droplet data in a liquid–gas two phase system in order to obtain the evolution of the droplet size distribution. The droplets are characterized with respect to the mean diameter of the distribution at different positions or distances from the nozzle. The present work is based on water droplets coexisting with air at ambient conditions. A novelty also presented is the use of the least squares method to solve an inverse population balance problem in order to find the breakage kernel function which dominates the governing process. If enough information on experiments is available, this constitute a basis for two phase separator modelling.