Summer Vacation Scholarship 2015-16 / Honours Project 2016
An Active Acoustic Monitoring System for Bubble Properties
CSIRO Supervisor: Dr. Steven Spencer (Mineral Resources)
Gaseous bubbles are a ubiquitous feature of natural and artificial liquid systems.
They are a central component of many liquids-based industrial processes. For
example, froth flotation is widely used in the minerals industry to separate mineral
particles from waste solids in a slurry by attachment to air bubbles. Dissolved air
flotation is also widely used in the treatment of wastewater to remove suspended
matter. Meanwhile, bubble column reactors are commonly used as multiphase
contactors and reactors for manufacture of synthetic fuels and as bioreactors in the
chemical, biochemical and petrochemical industries. Efficient control of these
processes requires on-line estimates of medium properties such as bubble size and
attached mass distributions and liquid viscosity and density.
CSIRO has recently developed a new method for active acoustic monitoring of
bubble and liquid properties. A Scholar is sought to assist in the development of an
automated system for on-line active acoustic monitoring of distributions of bubble and
liquid properties.
The Summer Vacation Scholarship will involve familiarisation with active acoustic
monitoring equipment and experimental configurations for the study of streams and
swarms of air bubbles in a water-filled tank. The experimental work will involve the
acquisition of data and interpretation of the active acoustic response in terms of
bubble properties. The goal is to investigate the relationships between active
acoustic source characteristics, experimental configuration, bubble acoustic
response and bubble physical properties.
The Honours project will build on the work undertaken in the Summer Vacation
Scholarship. The Scholar will develop a GUI-driven automated system for active
acoustic monitoring of bubble and liquid medium properties. This will include
distributions for bubble size and other properties. The software will be developed in
the MATLAB scientific programming language. Both the Summer Vacation and
Honours projects will be undertaken at the CSIRO Lucas Heights Laboratory.