Inside the Process

   Oil does not have viscosity, which would comply with Newton, Poiseuille or Stokes laws since long and disorderly located molecules of paraffin and resins form the flexible grid, in which a solution is located. That’s why the system maintains significant resistance to shear forces. Cavitation breaks the continuous chain and destroys the bonds between certain molecule parts. These bonds are relatively small; that’s why energy impact of an acoustic wave is quite enough to implement this process.

   Thus, one may note that cavitation affects the structural viscosity, i.e. Van der Waals bond opening, which are weak intermolecular bonds. Cavitation process also promotes uniform and fine distribution of water and gas bubbles initially contained in oil, which will also result in the viscosity decrease.

   Hydrodynamic acoustic generator (cavitating device) operates at the expense of the flow energy, which is supplied from a feed pump; and this device does not have moving parts. However, conversion of the mechanical energy portion into the energy of hydrodynamic and acoustic cavitation requires a certain pressure drop at a cavitating device, which is defined by calculation.

   During pilot tests of the equipment, the version of a vortex chamber was used, which was ended by an extension as a cylindrical channel with 90° turn, in order to attain the required result at fewer pressure drops at the acoustic generator. In this case, the above mentioned near-axis part of a fluid whirl assumes the spiral shape swirled along the channel axis. Besides, strong pulsating motion along the axis appears in the bent channel together with rotation in it. It promotes “smearing” gas bubbles across the channel cross section; the bubbles are separated from a fluid (gas-fluid emulsion) at the expense of centrifugal separation.

   During the fluid flow rotation, all gas bubbles in the flow are affected by centrifugal forces. Subject to a buoyancy force, the bubbles tend to accumulate into a compact braid near the rotational axis; however, the above mentioned axial pulsation breaks them and throws to significant rotation radiuses accompanying by intensive collapse of gas bubbles. Thus, cavitation intensifies together with all above mentioned processes.

   During the equipment manufacturing, one may specify the bigger diameter of inlet nozzles [2] (see Fig. 3) resulting in the less pressure drop at the device (at the given flow rate of the product in it). even such small pressure drop may provide minimum speed of the flow swirling that is necessary for effective acoustic generator operation