Comparative study by PEPT and DEM for flow and mixing in a ploughshare mixer

Analysis of the mixing of solid particles in a plowshare mixer via discrete element method (DEM)

“…They demonstrated that the rotational speed of the plow blade had a significant effect on the mixing quality and the nature of the flow in this type of the mixer. Laurent and Cleary [19] utilized PEPT and DEM to study the flow of the solid particles in a plowshare mixer with one plow both quantitatively and qualitatively. They reported good agreement between PEPT data and DEM results.…”

“…Thus, the objective of this study was to utilize DEM to calculate the Lacey index as a function of the initial loading, rotational speed, fill level, and particle size for a six-blade plowshare mixer. In this study, the experimental data reported by Laurent and Cleary [19] for the mean square of the axial and the radial displacements of the particles were used to validate the DEM model developed for the plowshare mixer.…”

Numerical simulation of the mixing process of the continuous mixer using the discrete element method

“…a) The particles were mainly outflow from the right (region 3,4,7,8,11,12) and the bottom (region 14,15,16) as shown in figure 4. b) The effective mixing time became longer and the mixing uniformity became higher from the outlet a to outlet b to outlet c at the same rotation speed.…”

“…The export was divided into 16 regions respectively numbered as shown in Fig.5, the particles were mainly outflow from the right(region 3,4,7,8,11,12) and the bottom(region 14,15,16). Adding baffle in outlet can block a portion of the particles, making the retention time of the particles in the mixer longer than no baffle, so that the effective mixing time of material growth…”

“…The structure and parameters of the mixing machinery directly affects whether the products which produced by the machinery meet the final production requirements, therefore, many scholars try to find out the relationship between mechanical structure and mixing parameter in various ways. Some scholars using different experimental approaches to analyze the mixing such as positron emission tomography(PET), positron emission particle tracking (PEPT) [3][4][5][6] , X-ray tomography [7] 和magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) [8] . However, the conclusions of these experiments are only for the study of mixing mechanism, instead of associating the quality of the mixture and mechanical structure, the design of the mixing machinery depends on experience.…”