Reduced mixing time in stirred vessels by means of irregular impellers

Abstract

Previous research has shown that using fractal-like blades instead of regular ones can result in a significant decrease in the power consumption of an unbaffled stirred vessel with a four-bladed radial impeller. In order to fully assess the mixing efficiency of a fractal-like or just irregular impeller with respect to a regular impeller, the mixing time required to homogenize an injected passive scalar was evaluated for both impeller types at Re = 320 and 1600 using direct numerical simulations. It was observed that the irregular impeller can lead to a considerably shorter mixing time. This result was explained by the differences in characteristics of flow and scalar fields generated by the two impellers. We also assess the effect of Re in the transitional regime. Moreover, a simple mathematical model is proposed which can approximate the decay rate of the passive scalar fluctuations integrated over the tank volume.