Abstract
Foam is encountered in many industrial fields, and influences safety and efficiency of plants such as floatation, wastewater treatment. However, conventional foam measurement techniques measure only an average foam diameter near a transparent wall. Hence, we propose a new technique to measure the dense foam by using a single-tip optical fiber probe (S-TOP). A problem is that foam cells are broken by contact of the S-TOP. In this study, the surface of the S-TOP was changed to hydrophilic by the surface treatment in order to prevent the foam burst. First, we elucidated the mechanisms of an output signal piercing a thin liquid film through experiments and computations. Second, we measured a small foam cluster in a glass cell using the S-TOP system. Based on these results, we established a new measurement system to measure foam-cell chord lengths. The differences between the S-TOP measurement and the visualization were ±10 %.
