Figure 1 . Schematic of the
experimental setup including the bubble column and airflow control and
monitoring system.
The air sparger was comprised of a porous air stone covering
~90% of the cross-section of the column that was
mounted on a cylindrical plenum. The porous air stone was fed from a 350
ml plenum, which used porous material identical to the air stone to
supply pressure drop for cross-sectional uniformity of air injection.
The sparger was designed to be pressurized up to 7 bar. A differential
pressure transducer (PX2300-DI, OMEGA) measured the pressure drop within
the line supplying the plenum. BSD depends heavily on the average pore
size in a homogenous bubbly flow. The average pore size
(rp ) was calculated from