Mixing phenomena is an important process for many industries including water treatment plants, pharma, food, oil, petroleum, paints and many chemical processing industries.
Most of the industry has a dedicated piece of equipment to perform this task called ‘Mixing Tank’. These tanks are provided with moving rotary blades or impeller to fasten the mixing process.
In the given case, the customer has reasonable questions to move forward his project to the build up stage. Whether a given mixer design would give a consistent mixed product? Does all mixing volume is fully utilising / dead zone if any? How much time will it take to make it homogeneous?
Obviously manufacturers can perform trial and error study by changing the various controllable variables such as flow rate of initial mixing components, rotating speed of agitators. However, this will take an experimental effort to perform this study. This will provide limited information about the mixing process. If outcome results demand change in design configuration of the mixing tank then it will be too late to adapt those changes along with loss of cost.
Using CFD simulation we have provided much more insight into the mixing process, showing the manufacturer a detailed picture of what is happening inside the tank and how the mixing species react over time and power consumption during the mixing process.
Continuing mixing tanks, we have provided valuable insight into continuous mixing tanks used in chemical reactions, generally known as ‘Continuous Stirred Tank Reactor (CSTR). Using CFD technique we have performed an analytical performed Residence Time Distribution (RTD) study on the various reactors and using an applicable parameter model we have provided vital information about the reactor such as fraction volume bypass, dead zone and active region present in the reactor. This information helps the manufacturer to design reactors with optimal flow performance.