Impellers dispersion

Example 12-3 An aqueous solution contains 10 ppm by weight of an organic contaminant of molecular weight 120, which must be removed by air oxidation in a sparger reactor at 25°C. The liquid is admitted at 1 liter/sec. The air at 1 atm is admitted at 0.5 liter/sec. An impeller disperses the air into bubbles of uniform 1 mm diameter and mixes gas and liquid very rapidly. The reaction in the hquid phase has the stoichiometry A + 2O2 —> products with a rate r =... 

Loading, in which the impeller disperses the gas throughout the upper portion of the vessel, and the bubbles reach the tank walls but do not recirculate below the impeller. 

POWER INPUT TO TURBINE DISPERSERS. The power consumed by a turbine impeller dispersing a gas is less than that indicated by Fig. 9.12 for agitating just liquids. The ratio of the power when gas is present to that for the liquid alone... 

Until recently most industrial scale, and even bench scale, bioreactors of this type were agitated by a set of Rushton turbines having about one-thind the diameter of the bioreactor (43) (Fig. 3). In this system, the air enters into the lower agitator and is dispersed from the back of the impeller blades by gas-fiUed or ventilated cavities (44). The presence of these cavities causes the power drawn by the agitator, ie, the power requited to drive it through the broth, to fall and this has important consequences for the performance of the bioreactor with respect to aeration (35). k a has been related to the power per unit volume, P/ U, in W/m and to the superficial air velocity, in m/s (20), where is the air flow rate per cross-sectional area of bioreactor. This relationship in water is... 

A widely used type of pump—mixer—settler, developed by IsraeH Mining Industries (IMI) (115), is shown in Figure 13a. A unit having capacity 8.3 m /min (2000 gal /min) has been used in phosphoric acid plants (116). The unique feature of this design is that the pumping device is not required to act as the mixer, and the two phases are dispersed by a separate impeller mounted on a shaft miming coaxially with the drive to the pump. 

In the Davy-Powergas unit (118—120), shown in Figure 13c, the Hquids mn through a draft tube and are pumped by an impeller mnning directly above the draft tube. The dispersion flows out from the top of the mixer and down through a channel into a rectangular settler. Large units of this type are used for copper extraction (7). 

When an impeller is rotated in an agitated tank containing two immiscible Hquids, two processes take place. One consists of breakup of dispersed drops due to shearing near the impeller, and the other is coalescence of drops as they move to low shear zones. The drop size distribution (DSD) is decided when the two competing processes are in balance. During the transition, the DSD curve shifts to the left with time, as shown in Figure 18. Time required to reach the equiHbrium DSD depends on system properties and can sometimes be longer than the process time. 

High Speed Fluid Energy Mills. This type of equipment is used primarily for preparation of relatively low viscosity mill bases for inks and paints. The first is an impeller type which achieves dispersion by the appHcation of shear. The second type is in the form of a rotor—stator, and the dispersion is achieved by impingement or impact. 

Gas-Liquid Dispersion This involves physical dispersion of gas bubbles by the impeller, and the effect of gas flow on the impeller. 

It is seldom possible to specify an initial mixer design requirement for an absolute bubble size prediction, particularly if coalescence and dispersion are involved. However, if data are available on the actual system, then many of these correlations could be used to predict relative changes in drop size conditions with changes in fluid properties or impeller variables. 

Data are not currently available on the dispersion with the newer fluidfoil impellers, but they are often used in industrial mixer-settler systems to maintain dispersion when additional resonance time holdup is required, after an initial dispersion is made by a radial- or axial-flow turbine. 

Dispersed-Solids Leacbing Equipment for leaching fine solids by dispersion and separation includes batch tanks agitated by rotating impellers or by air and a variety of continuous devices. 

Equipment suitable for reactions between hquids is represented in Fig. 23-37. Almost invariably, one of the phases is aqueous with reactants distributed between phases for instance, NaOH in water at the start and an ester in the organic phase. Such reac tions can be carried out in any kind of equipment that is suitable for physical extraction, including mixer-settlers and towers of various kinds-, empty or packed, still or agitated, either phase dispersed, provided that adequate heat transfer can be incorporated. Mechanically agitated tanks are favored because the interfacial area can be made large, as much as 100 times that of spray towers, for instance. Power requirements for L/L mixing are normally about 5 hp/1,000 gal and tip speeds of turbine-type impellers are 4.6 to 6.1 i7i/s (15 to 20 ft/s). 

Impeller Reynolds number and equations for mixing power for particle suspensions are in Sec. 5. Dispersion of gasses into liquids is in Sec. 14. Usually, an increase in mechanical agitation is more effective than is an increase in aeration rate for improving mass transfer. 

An example of liquid/liquid mixing is emulsion polymerization, where droplet size can be the most important parameter influencing product quality. Particle size is determined by impeller tip speed. If coalescence is prevented and the system stability is satisfactory, this will determine the ultimate particle size. However, if the dispersion being produced in the mixer is used as an intermediate step to carry out a liquid/liquid extraction and the emulsion must be settled out again, a dynamic dispersion is produced. Maximum shear stress by the impeller then determines the average shear rate and the overall average particle size in the mixer. 

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