Numerical Study of Flow Field and Mixing Performance of a New Curved-Sheet Blade-Folded Static Mixer

Abstract

Mixing is an important unit of operation in the process industry. A static mixer is a device commonly used for liquid mixing in a pipe or channel. This study proposes a new curved-sheet blade-folded (CBF) static mixer. The CBF mixing element is characterized by folded blades arranged alternatively on both sides of a curved sheet. The features of the flow and mixing of two miscible liquids in the new CBF static mixer, e.g., velocity magnitude distribution, vortices, coefficient of variation, and extensional efficiency, are investigated by using computational fluid dynamics. It has shown that in terms of distributive mixing and dispersive mixing, the CBF performs better than the Kenics, Komax, and LPD static mixers. Compared to the other static mixers, the multicomponent system reaches full homogeneity within a short distance in the CBF static mixer. The radial motion of liquid induced by the vortices is attributed to the intensified mixing performance of the CBF static mixer. Furthermore, this study employs proper orthogonal decomposition to reconstruct the velocity and vorticity fields. It has been shown that the fundamental features of the mixing process can be characterized by the velocity and vorticity fields reconstructed by the first seven modes.