Numerical Study of Viscous Fluid Flows in a Kenics Static Mixer

Abstract

Since many years static mixers find usage in chemical, food, cosmetic and pharmaceutical industry. One of the most commonly used is the Kenics type static mixer. In a framework of the current work the CFD simulation for Kenics static mixer were performed. In food or cosmetic industry one must deal very often with non-Newtonian fluids. Therefore this work concerns the numerical study of non-Newtonian fluid flux in a kenics km static mixer with laminar flow using the Navier-Stocks equation governing the phenomenon and the pressure loss equation. This simulation was made using the computational fluid dynamic software (CFX 12.0). In this paper we studied the influence of the Reynolds number, the viscosity of the fluid, aspect ratio and the number of helical elements fixed on the pressure drop. It was found that the CFD results of pressure drop for non-Newtonian power law was similar to literature data (the correlation of C.D.GRACE 1971 and the numerical simulation of E.SAATDJIAN 2012).