Vibrating Capillary Device for Porduction of Uniform-Sized Droplets.

A vibrating capillary device for producing uniform-sized liquid droplets at a constnat and known rate has been constructed and experimentally tested. The droplet generation technique applies the principle that a cylinder of liquid is dynamically unstable under the action of surface tension. When a regular mechanical disturbance within a specified wavelength range is applied to a liquid jet, the jet will disintegrate into a stream of uniform-sized droplets. The size of the droplets produced depends on the diameter of the capillary through which the liquid flows and the frequency of the impressed disturbance. An electromechanical vibrator and frequency generator were used to create the capillary wave, and uniform-sized water droplets in the range of 130 to 212 microns in diameter were obtained. The results suggest that a series of capillary tubes with diameters of 1, 1.5, 2.3, 3.3 and 5 mils would produce the entire spectrum of droplets in the range of 40- to 300-micron diameters. Author