Vessel-Based Mechanical Mixing

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Vessel-based mechanical mixing involving viscous media is an essential operation in industrial sectors like pharmaceutics, chemistry and oil among many others. In such processes, the quality of the final product depends on the homogenization obtained, which is a consequence of the operating conditions. This topic has been investigated using numerical and experimental methods.[1-3]

In practice, the mixing of viscous liquids in stirred tanks is often made using close clearance impellers such as helical ribbons (HR). Although open impellers are sometimes used for moderate viscosity fluids (less than a few tens of Pa•s), macromixing with HR-type impellers has been well accepted even if the lower side of the mixing vessel is prone to spurious flow phenomena such as segregated and compartmentalized regions that lead to long mixing times as a consequence of the low pumping capacity.

The reports available in the literature investigating the HR mixing performance deals with the geometry of HR mixers as variable quite diverse: single ribbon, double ribbon, impellers with or without an inner screw fixed along the central shaft even used in flat bottom cylindrical tanks or in dished bottom tanks.[4,5]. Beckner and Smith[6] and Brito et al.[7] reported the power drawn for HR agitating both Newtonian and non-Newtonian liquids. Delaplace et al.[8] provided a detailed description of the application of HR in industrial processes emphasizing the geometrical parameters effects like number of ribbons, pitch size (p), blade width (w) or bottomwall clearance effects on the circulation and mixing times.

The study of macroscopic parameters for small mixing volumes (<75 L) have been the main topic of the published reports, even for Newtonian or non-N...

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...e on the mixing of Newtonian viscous flows for industrial purposes. Hence that the goal of the present work is to develop a numerical investigation to describe the hydrodynamics generated by a standard helical ribbon impeller in a stirred tank in comparison with two HR redesigned at the bottom. The analysis focuses the improvement of the axial pumping in the lower side of the tank and discusses on the flow patterns, the power drawn and several distributive mixing criteria such as pumping capacity, shear rate and stretching efficiency. An originality of the present work are the Poincaré maps prepared to compare the mixing performance based on the tracking of a single massless tracer for one hour blending. Such a long period represents a challenge for computation studies. To our knowledge, it has never been performed before for the characterization of HR impellers .

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