Chemical Engineering and Processing, Vol.122, 31-43, 2017
Effects of internal geometry modifications on the dispersive and distributive mixing in static mixers
In this article, different static mixer geometries are studied with an objective of achieving enhanced mixing performance. Design modifications such as incorporating perforations of varying size and different shapes of serrations are introduced to a standard Sulzer SMX geometry. CFD simulations are performed using COMSOL Multiphysics software to investigate mixing performance in these mixers under laminar flow conditions with an incompressible fluid as a working medium. For dispersive mixing, computational results were compared in terms of velocity field, pressure field, shear rate and extensional efficiency of each type of static mixer. Further, binary cluster particle tracer simulations in the flow domain are performed to compute the distributive mixing capacity of these static mixers which is quantified in terms of the standard deviation. Based on the computational results of both dispersive mixing and distributive mixing, the best modified static mixer geometry is proposed which facilitates significantly improved mixing compared to that of a standard SMX geometry.
Keywords:Distributive mixing;Static mixer;Dispersive mixing;Mixing performance;Internal geometry modifications