Abstract

The design of suspension mixing tanks is often embedded in empiricism due to insufficient understanding of the hydrodynamics of dense solid-liquid interaction. This is particularly limiting during the design of mixing tanks or batch reactor for expensive high quality products in the fine chemicals, biological and pharmaceutical processing industries. In this paper, a computational fluid dynamics (CFD)-assisted design approach has been employed to study the effectiveness of mixing tank geometrical configurations to suspend particles. Ten crucial variables were investigated and the effects of changing the value of these variables were documented. In addition, a multivariable study involving these ten variables was also conducted to investigate the most important variables among them. Finally, by capturing the essence of the results, a design heuristic was developed which can be applied across the process industry.

Erratum

On July 15, 2009 the acknowledgment was updated.

Originally the acknowledgment read:
“The author is grateful to Mr. Paul Flavel, Operations Manager of Australian Defence Industries (ADI) – Mulwala high explosives manufacturing facility, for sponsoring this process R&D project. The author is equally grateful to Dr. Patrick O'Flaherty of ADI – Garden Island naval base, for his supports and encouragement of this research project.”

Recommended Citation

Lea, Jimmy (2009) "Suspension Mixing Tank - Design Heuristic," Chemical Product and Process Modeling: Vol. 4 : Iss. 1, Article 17.
DOI: 10.2202/1934-2659.1334
Available at: http://www.bepress.com/cppm/vol4/iss1/17