Mixing breakup

Addition Point. The flocculant addition point in a continuous system can also have a significant effect on flocculant performance. The turbulence as the flocculant is mixed in and the floes travel toward the point where they enter the thickener or filter causes both the formation and breakup of floes. Usually there is an optimal addition point or points which have to be determined empirically. In cases where the same polymer is being added at two or more points, the relative amounts added at each point may also affect performance. Thus providing multiple addition points in the design of new installations is recommended (56). 

Some mycehal fermentations exhibit early sporulation, breakup of mycehum, and low yields if the shear is excessive. A tip speed or 250 to 500 cm/s (8 to 16 ft/s) is considered permissible. Mixing time has been proposed as a scale-up consideration, but httle can be done to improve it in a large fermenter because gigantic motors would be required to get rapid mixing. Culturing cells from plants or animals is beset by mixing problems because these cell are easily damaged by shear. 

Almost all flows in chemical reactors are turbulent and traditionally turbulence is seen as random fluctuations in velocity. A better view is to recognize the structure of turbulence. The large turbulent eddies are about the size of the width of the impeller blades in a stirred tank reactor and about 1/10 of the pipe diameter in pipe flows. These large turbulent eddies have a lifetime of some tens of milliseconds. Use of averaged turbulent properties is only valid for linear processes while all nonlinear phenomena are sensitive to the details in the process. Mixing coupled with fast chemical reactions, coalescence and breakup of bubbles and drops, and nucleation in crystallization is a phenomenon that is affected by the turbulent structure. Either a resolution of the turbulent fluctuations or some measure of the distribution of the turbulent properties is required in order to obtain accurate predictions. 

Mixing and dispersion of viscous fluids—blending in the polymer processing literature—is the result of complex interaction between flow and events occurring at drop length-scales breakup, coalescence, and hydrodynamic interactions. Similarly, mixing and dispersion of powdered solids in viscous liquids is the result of complex interaction between flow and... 

This paper is divided into two main, interconnected parts—breakup and coalescence of immiscible fluids, and aggregation and fragmentation of solids in viscous liquids—preceded by a brief introduction to mixing, this being focused primarily on stretching and self-similarity. 

The treatment of mixing of immiscible fluids starts with a description of breakup and coalescence in homogeneous flows. Classical concepts are briefly reviewed and special attention is given to recent advances—satellite formation and self-similarity. A general model, capable of handling breakup and coalescence while taking into account stretching distributions and satellite formation, is described. 

The Life of an Element of Fluid. Let us estimate how long a fluid element retains its identity. First, all large elements are broken into smaller elements by stretching or folding (laminar behavior) or by turbulence generated by baffles, stirrers, etc., and mixing theory estimates the time needed for this breakup. 

However with stirring and coalescence and breakup, both effects tend to mix the contents of the bubbles or drops, and this situation should be handled using the CSTR mass balance equation. As you might expect, for a real drop or bubble reactor the residence time distribution might not be given accurately by either of these limits, and it might be necessary to measure the RDT to correctly describe the flow pattern in the discontinuous phase. 

Figure 12-12 Sketches of possible flow patterns of bubbles rising through a liquid phase in a bubble column. Stirring of the continuous phase will cause the residence time distribution to be broadened, and coalescence and breakup of drops will cause mixing between bubbles. Both of these effects cause the residence time distribution in the bubble phase to approach that of a CSTR. For falling drops in a spray tower, the situation is similar but now the drops fall instead of rising in the reactor.

SO as to make it more suitable for shaping, is then mixed with fillers and wafer. The mixture constitutes a composite material that prevents cracking and breakup of the brick while dr3ung and makes the dry, finished bricks strong tough, and resistant to weathering, and to external forces (see Textbox 32). The addition of water makes the mixture pliable and easily molded into the required shape (Lynch 1993 Gurke 1987). 

Second, the northern polar vortex is much less stable and hence less isolated from mixing with external air masses compared to the Antarctic case events in January and February in which there was substantial mixing of air from midlatitudes into the vortex have been reported (e.g., see Browell et al., 1993 Plumb et al., 1994). This makes it particularly important to make both measurements and model predictions with sufficient resolution (Edouard et al., 1996). In addition, the Arctic polar vortex tends to break up earlier than the Southern Hemisphere polar vortex since ozone destruction is determined to a large degree by the extent of exposure to sunlight, the earlier breakup and mixing with air external to the vortex cuts the ozone loss short. 

Time. An example of the breakup of agglomerates of solid oxidizer as a function of mixing time is given in Figure 4. 

Figure 4. Effect of mixing time on breakup of agglomerates...

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