Bubble Elimination for Coating Material

Bubbles in coating color greatly influence the paper quality and coater runnability. It is particularly important technology to remove bubbles for the paper coating industry. Recently, one of the authors has developed a novel device using swirl flow capable of eliminating bubbles and decreasing dissolved gases from fluid. This device is called the “Bubble Eliminator”. Using the bubble eliminator will enable the coated products to make better. In this paper performance evaluation of the bubble eliminator is investigated through numerical analysis and visualization of the swirl flow in the device. Pressure distributions in the bubble eliminator are calculated by a three-dimensional numerical analysis in the case of changing conditions of the fluid flow rate. The swirl flow pattern in a transparent bubble eliminator is visualized and processed as digital image by a high-speed video camera system. The results of the flow visualization are compared between experiments and numerical analysis. The performance evaluation of the bubble removal effectiveness is numerically verified.