Investigation of a novel design propeller to agitate non-Newtonian fluids using experimental and numerical methods

Mixing of non-Newtonian fluids in the stirred vessel is a crucial part of process engineering technology, which is ubiquitous across a wide range of industrial applications. The broad applicability of mechanically stirred vessels demands a comprehensive understanding of the physical and fluid mathematical phenomena controlling the performance of these fundamental units. There have two main objectives for the mixing system: optimize the mixing quality and minimize the power requirement. The complexity rheological of the non-Newtonian fluids can result in undesired mixing performance (dead zones) within the mixing vessel, which limits the mixing ability of the impeller and result in overload power consumption. Therefore, it is crucial to investigate how to reach the desired mixing product and evaluate the power consumption. In the literature, many researchers have already studied many design processes to achieve these two objectives. Usually, these methods mainly depend on the experientialism or scaled to a specific application. The power consumption can be obtained by using experientialism or scale-up procedures of this kind of mixing system, which has proven to be error-prone. Hence, a new design method—blade element momentum theory (BET), which derived to predict the full power requirement without combining experimental results within the design procedures have been developed by Reviol et al. However, this design method has not been experimentally proved yet. Therefore, in this dissertation, efforts were made to validate the power consumption of the new design propeller with the experimental method and study the hydrodynamics of a new design propeller mixing non-Newtonian fluids in a stirred vessel either with side-entry (Part-I) or top-entry configurations (Part-II).