Application of service curves to the design of an air lift for liquids

Abstract

Effective operation of an air lift must be ensured by the correct choice of its main elements; at present, however, such a choice based on calculation presents significant difficulties and is often made at random, without a guarantee of reliability. The reason for this lies in the imperfection of the existing theory of airlift operation. Or rather, a unified theory of this device, so simple in design, still does not exist: we can only talk about various theoretical studies based on different principles. All these studies, to a greater or lesser extent, suffer from unfoundedness, vagueness and even fallacy of their main provisions and assumptions, as well as experimental unverification. The objective of this work is to identify unacceptable provisions of these theories, and to re-construct the airlift theory on the principle of elastic emulsion expansion, eliminating errors inherent in previous works. At the present stage, however, it may already be possible to apply operational curves to airlift calculations, as we did in this work (see article).