Part IX - Papers - Deoxidation of Liquid Copper by a Submerged Gas Jet

A study zvas made of the deoxidation of copper at 1170°C by injecting a jet of carbon monoxide vertically upwards into the melt. The effects of submersion depth (2 to 20 cm), orifice diameter (& to 5 in.), and gas velocity (100 to 3650 ft per sec) were examined. In the oxygen range 0.1 to 1.0 pct 0, the overall rate was conlrolled by gaseoLcs mass Lransfer. The results were interpreted in terms of a rate coefficient per unit depth which was found to be constant with distance along the jet axis and nearly proportional to the orifice Reynolds number in the range 1000 < NReo < 9100. AS the gas flow rate through an orifice submerged in a liquid is progressively increased, at least three regions of bubble formation may be distinguished. At very low rates, the formation of bubbles is practically a static phenomenon, depending on the orifice diameter, the liquid surface tension, and the densities of the two phases. In this region, the bubble size is constant while the frequency of bubble formation increases with gas flow rate.&apos;-3 At higher flows (500 < NR~, < 2100), the frequency of bubble formation reaches a steady value and the bubble size increases with gas flow rate; when the bubbles issuing from the orifice become so large that they start coalescing to form larger bubbles, the turbulence induced in the liquid by the passage of previous bubbles shatters them into small bubbles of varying size. Finally, for gas velocities in the intermediate and turbulent regions of flow (NR,, > 2100) a tangential separation surface is created around the jet and momentum transfer takes place between it and the surrounding liquid medium. The entrainment of liquid and the resulting deceleration of the gas-liquid dispersion causes the jet to expand forming a characteristic jet cone. The large velocity and density differences between the jet and the liquid result in a high degree of instability and the jet envelope fluctuates rapidly.The characteristic jet cone can be observed by means of time exposure photographs such as those shown in Fig. 1 for an air jet introduced vertically upwards in a water bath. High-speed photography has showns that the gas-liquid dispersion within the cone consists of small bubbles the size of which depends mainly on the jet orifice diameter and Reynolds number. In the laminar region of flow, the following correlation was obtained by Leibson: The results of Liebson et a1.&apos; are plotted in Fig. 2. It can be seen that the region 2000 < NReo c 10,000 is not well-defined experimentally. In the entrance to the fully turbulent region of flow (NR,, = 10,000), the mean bubble diameter decreased to about 0.4 cm and varied only slightly from there on according to the correlation: