Impeller stirred tank

As discussed in Chapter 6, high-energy dissipation zones have been identified for certain stirred tank/ impeller configurations. These zones are often small, and they can move enough so that the exact location of and linear velocity from an addition dip pipe ate very difficult to optimize. When very intense micro- and/or mesomixing are required, stirred tanks are not the ideal type of equipment to catty out a robust, reproducible process. 

FIG. 6-39 Typical stirred tank configurations, showing time-averaged flow patterns for axial flow and radial flow impellers. From Oldshue, Fluid Mixing Technology, McGraw-Hill, New Yo7 k, 1983.)... 

Blend time tb, the time required to achieve a specified maximum standard deviation of concentration after injection of a tracer into a stirred tank, is made dimensionless by multipfying by the impeller rotational speed ... 

Batch Stirred Tanks Tanks agitated by coaxial impellers (turbines, paddles, or propellers) are commonly used for batch dissolution of solids in liquids and may be used for leaching fine solids. Insofar as the controlhng rate in the mass transfer is the rate of transfer of mate-... 

Real reactors deviate more or less from these ideal behaviors. Deviations may be detected with re.sidence time distributions (RTD) obtained with the aid of tracer tests. In other cases a mechanism may be postulated and its parameters checked against test data. The commonest models are combinations of CSTRs and PFRs in series and/or parallel. Thus, a stirred tank may be assumed completely mixed in the vicinity of the impeller and in plug flow near the outlet. 

A basic stirred tank design is shown in Fig. 23-30. Height to diameter ratio is H/D = 2 to 3. Heat transfer may be provided through a jacket or internal coils. Baffles prevent movement of the mass as a whole. A draft tube enhances vertical circulation. The vapor space is about 20 percent of the total volume. A hollow shaft and impeller increase gas circulation (as in Fig. 23-31). A splasher can be attached to the shaft at the hquid surface to improve entrainment of gas. A variety of impellers is in use. The pitched propeller moves the liquid axially, the flat blade moves it radially, and inclined blades move it both axially and radially. The anchor and some other designs are suited to viscous hquids. 

FIG. 23-30a A basic stirred tank design, not to scale, showing a lower radial impeller and an upper axial impeller boused in a draft tube. Four equally spaced baffles are standard. H = beigbt of liquid level, Dj = tank diameter, d = impeller diameter. For radial impellers, 0.3 < d/Dt < 0.6. 

FIG. 23-30 Basic stirred tank design and selected lands of impellers, (h) Propeller, (c) Turbine, (d) Hollow, (e) Anchor,... 

Consider a stirred tank vessel having a Newtonian liquid of density p and viseosity p, is agitated by an impeller of diameter D, rotating at a rotational speed N. Let the tank diameter be D, the impeller width W, and the liquid depth H. The power P required for agitation of a single-phase liquid ean be expressed as ... 

Proportions of a stirred tank relative to the diameter D liquid level = D turbine impeller diameter = D/3 impeller level above bottom = D/3 impeller blade width = D/15 four vertical baffles with width = D/10. 

It is common practice to use geometric similarity in the scaleup of stirred tanks (but not tubular reactors). This means that the production-scale reactor will have the same shape as the pilot-scale reactor. All linear dimensions such as reactor diameter, impeller diameter, and liquid height will change by the same factor, Surface areas will scale as Now, what happens to tmix upon scaleup ... 

Stirred tanks are often used for gas-liquid reactions. The usual geometry is for the liquid to enter at the top of the reactor and to leave at the bottom. The gas enters through a sparge ring underneath the impeller and leaves through the vapor space at the top of the reactor. A simple but effective way of modeling this and many similar situations is to assume perfect mixing within each phase. 

Figure 15.5 Measured and simulated turbulent kinetic energies (normalized with the impeller tip speed) at the impeller plane in a stirred tank reactor (From [17]).

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. 

In a stirred tank reactor, these low-pressure regions are behind the impeller blades, in the trailing vortices leaving the impeller blades, behind the baffles, and at the center of the large turbulent eddies. 

Breakup will occur due to high turbulence and high shear rate. This will occur in the impeller region and close to the walls. In a stirred tank, almost all breakup of the bubbles occurs in the impeller region. According to Eq. (15.3), the energy required to break up a 5-mm bubble is on the order of 1W m 3, while 35 W m-3 is required to break up a 1-mm air bubble in water. A high rate of bubble breakup... 

Due to the liquid circulation in stirred tanks which transports all particles with a certain frequency through the impeller zone, they undergo the maximum shear stress. 

As can be seen even from the kinetic curves in Fig. 3, the type of impeller has a decisive influence on particle disintegration in stirred tanks. This is particularly clear from a comparison of other impeller systems on the basis of the reference particle diameter dp in Fig. 4. 

Figure 11 shows the reference floe diameter for viscometers as a function of shear stress and also the comparison with the results for stirred tanks. The stress was determined in the case of viscosimeters from Eq. (13) and impeller systems from Eqs. (2) and (4) using the maximum energy density according to Eq. (20). For r > 1 N/m (Ta > 2000), the disintegration performance produced by the flow in the viscosimeter with laminar flow of Taylor eddies is less than that in the turbulent flow of stirred tanks. Whereas in the stirred tank according to Eq. (4) and (16b) the particle diameter is inversely affected by the turbulent stress dp l/T, in viscosimeters it was found for r > 1.5 N/m, independently of the type (Searle or Couette), the dependency dp l/ pi (see Fig. 11). 

It can be seen that for the same average power input, greater stresses are produced by gas sparging than by many impellers. Fig. 17. According to the comparison in Fig. 17, evidently zones exist in bubble columns in which the energy densities are 20 times higher than in a stirred tank. But the comparison on the basis of average power input in Fig. 16 shows that also impeller (for example small inclined blade impellers) exist which produce more shear than bubble columns. 

The diagram in Fig. 18 shows direct comparisons with the corresponding results for the floccular system. The particle diameters dpv and dp and the relative enzyme activity a/a in Fig. 18 show similar patterns of variation as with the specific impeller power P/V. It is therefore appropriate to represent these results by means of the correlation function obtained for the floccular system according to Eq. (20). As in Fig. 9, a clear correlation of the results is found for both systems (see Figs. 19 and 20). It is thus clear that particle disintegration in a stirred tank with baffles follows a similar pattern for other particle systems. 

For reactors with free turbulent flow without dominant boundary layer flows or gas/hquid interfaces (due to rising gas bubbles) such as stirred reactors with bafQes, all used model particle systems and also many biological systems produce similar results, and it may therefore be assumed that these results are also applicable to other particle systems. For stirred tanks in particular, the stress produced by impellers of various types can be predicted with the aid of a geometrical function (Eq. (20)) derived from the results of the measurements. Impellers with a large blade area in relation to the tank dimensions produce less shear, because of their uniform power input, in contrast to small and especially axial-flow impellers, such as propellers, and all kinds of inclined-blade impellers. 

For conventional stirred tank processing of the nitration of benzene, the dependence of conversion on impeller speed is given in [102]. 

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