Maximum Stable Drop Diameter in Stirred Dispersions

Transient drop-size distributions of stirred dispersions undergoing breakage were experimentally measured at long stirring times. The results show that drops continue to break the entire duration of the experiment (at least up to 10 h) and force a reevaluation of the widely held concept of a maximum stable drop diameter, d_max. Transient distributions show the existence of self-similarity, which is the same as that observed in transient distributions obtained at short times (up to ∼ 1 h, Sathyagal et al., 1995b) indicating that the nature of breakage does not change with time. The existence of similarity at long stirring times can be used to obtain good estimates of breakage rates of small drops by an inverse problem procedure.