Experimental investigation and CFD simulation of power consumption for mixing in Gyro Shaker

Abstract

The better mixing of ingredients is the key to improving the quality of the process in the manufacturing of several products. Gyro Shaker is a dual rotation mixer commonly used for mixing highly viscous fluids. In this work, CFD simulation for the multiphase mixing of Gyro Shaker is carried out for obtaining numerical solutions. Simulations of three different mixing models namely Eulerian granular model, mixture model and volume of fluid (VOF) model are compared with each other. Reynolds number and power number based on characteristic velocity were derived for the Gyro Shaker. Experiments were conducted to validate the mixing power by the simulation using torque method and viscous dissipation method. The viscous dissipation method for mixing power demonstrates a low deviation from the experiment data than torque method. Among the three simulation models, the multiphase mixture model shows the minimum variation of the experimental data. A comparison of the flow field of the different mixing models is also carried out.