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Oscillating Droplets

Abstract

AN increasing amount of work is being carried out on the behaviour of drops of solvent rising or falling in water, in order to investigate the rate-determining steps involved in solvent extraction. Previous work in these laboratories using mutually saturated phases demonstrated that in packed columns the statistical mean volume-surface diameter is proportional to (γ/Δρg)1/2 when the packing size is above a critical value1. Later experiments have now shown that if the dispersed solvent phase contains an undistributed solute, for example, acetone, the droplets are larger than predicted, whereas no effect is observed if the solute is in the aqueous phase. A smaller increase in size is also obtained when the phases are pure but not mutually saturated.

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References

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LEWIS, J., PRATT, H. Oscillating Droplets. Nature 171, 1155–1156 (1953). https://doi.org/10.1038/1711155a0

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