The multi-orifice plate gas sparger

mainly composed of a multi-orifice plate and a gas chamber

is one of the most common sparger facilities. The aeration performance of multi-orifice plate has a close relation with the multiorifice plate configuration. In addition

the weeping phenomenon has a considerable influence on the gas chamber condition which affects the bubble detachment volume directly. This paper conducts a set of visual experiments to study the influence of multi-orifice configuration and gas chamber condition on the aeration performance of gas sparger. For multi-orifice plate

an improved theoretical model is proposed which considers the wave effect of the previous bubbles generated from adjacent orifices and the variance of the number of active bubbling orifice. A parameter is proposed to evaluate the aeration performance in order to overcome the difficulty caused by the randomness of bubble formation process. The experimental results suggest that the gas chamber filled with water is in favor of large bubble formation. The influence of the pitch of orifice on aeration performance can only be observed in high-restricted case. According to the theoretical model and experimental results

the influences of gas flow rate and the number of open orifices on the aeration performance are analyzed and a design criterion for the number of open orifice is proposed.