Experimental Study on Splashing During Liquid Jet Impingement Onto a Liquid Film

A liquid jet is of considerable importance in many industrial fields including jet cleaning, jet engine and combustion. As an important example, the Monju nuclear power plant in Japan experienced a sodium leak in 1995. This led to a fire accident because the sodium reacted with oxygen in the air. To predict the significance of the fire accident, accurate evaluation of the amount of splashed droplets caused by the sodium jet impingement is of great importance. In this work, the relationship between the condition of a liquid jet and the amount of splashed droplets is explored experimentally. In the experiments, a liquid jet was emanated vertically downward from a circular nozzle onto a liquid film formed on a horizontal plate. Visualization using a high speed camera was performed to observe the condition of the liquid jet. From the nozzle, the mode of the liquid jet changed jet, lump and drop. Here, the jet mode means the continuous jet with smooth surface, the lump mode the continuous jet with disturbed surface and the drop mode the broken jet. Dependences of the transition length to each mode on the important parameters such as the jet velocity and the nozzle diameter were investigated. Measurement was also conducted for the splash ratio that is defined as the ratio of the amount of splashed droplets to the jet flow rate. It was found that the splash ratio is high when the liquid jet is in the drop mode at the impact point. It was shown that the splash ratio can be correlated well as a function of the impact Weber number and the Strouhal number of the droplets impinging the liquid film.