Numerical study of viscous fluid flows in a kenics static mixer

Abstract

Since many years, the 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 simulations of Kenics static mixers were performed for viscous Newtonian fluids under laminar flow conditions. This simulation was made by using the computational fluid dynamic software (CFX 12.0). In this paper, we studied the influence of Reynolds number, fluid viscosity, aspect ratio and the number of helical elements on the flow patterns and pressure drop. It was found that the CFD results of pressure drop were similar to the literature data (the numerical simulation of Saatdjian et al. (2012) and the correlation of Grace (1971)).