Monodisperse sprays for various purposes - Their production and characteristics

The production of liquid sprays represents a key technology for a wide range of industrial processes. Most applications currently use pressure or air-assisted atomization, resulting in the production of polydisperse sprays. Recent advances in experimental and numerical techniques for investigating liquid spraying processes, however, have enabled a closer examination of parameter optimization, leading to the conclusion that in many cases, a much narrower size distribution, or even a monodisperse spray, may exhibit many advantages. Currently monodisperse droplet generators, or drop-on-demand generators, do not meet this challenge of producing monodisperse sprays, primarily owing to the very low volume flow rate of liquid which is atomized. In the present work, a monodisperse spray generator is introduced, which overcomes this difficulty for many applications.