Fractal Impeller for Stirred Tank Reactors

Abstract

Stirred tank reactors are used for variety of applications at different scales of operation. The conventional impellers tend to develop regions having nonuniform energy dissipation rates in the stirred reactor. In this work, we propose a novel fractal impeller, which helps in reducing such nonuniformities and help develop a uniform randomness throughout the reactor. The impeller geometry is discussed in detail. Experimental measurements of the power consumption, mixing time, suspension quality, and the ability for gas dispersion were carried out, and the performance is compared with the conventional impellers. The impeller is seen to have a low power number, and it can generate a uniform suspension of particles even at relatively lower impeller speeds and can efficiently disperse gas into liquid to yield relatively higher gas hold-up values. The Fourier analysis of the power consumption time series data indicates that no specific prominent frequency events exist in the reactor, and the spectrum showed several frequency events to exist in the reactor with almost identical prominence.

Experimental and numerical investigation of fractal-tree-like heat exchanger manufactured by 3D printing

“…Errera [5] , which has been applied to various chemical equipments such as stirrers [6] , distributors [7] , and reactors [8] . The concept has also been adopted in the design of a heat exchanger [9] .…”

Chemical and Process Engineering

“…The easiest and most common is the visual method consisting in the reading of the gas-liquid mixture level increase on the vessel wall in comparison to the single-phase system. Other measurement techniques include: suction probes and image analysis, capillary suction probe, pressure or conductivity probes, laser doppler anemometry, photographic techniques, yet those require a more specialized equipment (Arjunwadkar et al, 1998;Busciglio et al, 2013;Kulkarni et al, 2011;Lee and Dudukovic, 2014;Sardeshpande et al, 2017;Takriff et al, 2009).…”