Scale-Up of Solid-Liquid Mixing Based on Constant Power/Volume and Equal Blend Time Using VisiMix Simulation

Abstract

Mixing is one of the important process in many areas of chemical industries, for instance pharmaceutical, drug, ink, paint and other industries. Solid-liquid suspension is produced for 80% of all mixing industries such as leaching process, crystallization process, catalytic reactions, precipitation, coagulation, dissolution and other applications. Two main objectives in solid-liquid mixing namely, avoid settling of solid particles on the tank bottom and ensure the solid particles are uniformly distributed. Many factors that can affect the quality of solid-liquid mixing, they are tank geometry, impeller geometry and speed, baffles, viscosity and density of media. Scale-up of the process is important to conduct before produce it on commercial scale. Two parameters for scale-up solid-liquid mixing are equal blend time and power per volume. Before scaling up the process to industrial scale, an engineer must know the condition of the mixture between both of two. VisiMix can simulating scale-up of solid-liquid mixing in order to know the phenomena inside the tank without conducting a large number of experiments and cheaper. The simulation start from keep the ratio of impeller to tank diameter remains constant, then change the condition operation of mixing. In this paper, power per volume parameter is more recommended as a result of the degree of uniformity of solid phase in liquid.