Mixing Characteristics of a Magnetically Driven Rushton Turbine in an Unbaffled Stirred Tank Reactor

Abstract

The standard and well-researched stirred vessel configuration comprises a tank equipped with one or more impellers positioned in the vessel’s axis and multiple wall-mounted baffles preventing the central vortex creation. However, particular industries, such as biotechnology, have an increased need for a sterile environment that often results in the usage of atypical stirred vessel configurations. An example of a commonly equipped atypical stirred vessel is an unbaffled stirred tank with an eccentric magnetically driven impeller. However, there is only a little knowledge about the mixing characteristics of such designs. In this work, we list experimental results for both the standard and atypical stirred vessel configurations. Furthermore, we present a CFD model of the atypical configuration. The model is used to calculate its mixing characteristics that are subsequently compared against our experimental results. It is shown that for the liquid height (H) to the vessel diameter (T) ratio H/T ≲ 1.2, the characteristics of both the standard and atypical designs coincide. For higher liquid heights (i) the characteristics of the atypical design decrease dramatically, and (ii) the characteristics estimates based on approaches developed for the standard configuration become unreliable.