The effect of the cavity formation on the energy consumption characteristics of the agitated gas–liquid bioreactor

Abstract

Detailed power consumption characteristics from experiments and simulations of gas–liquid stirred tanks with shear-thinning power-law liquids are presented. The motion of bubbles was investigated based on the Euler–Euler approach with a bubble cluster concept. The drag coefficient of bubbles with a constant bubble diameter was modeled as the Schiller and Naumann function. The predicted power consumption of a gas–liquid mixture shows reasonable agreement with experimental data with a maximum deviation of 8.9%. For the studied aerated systems, a qualitatively new power reduction correction equation was derived and demonstrated a reasonable agreement with experimental results compared with the literature-reported equations. The effect of the concentrations and gas flow rates on power consumption was presented. It was found that the power consumption of different mixtures is related to the change in the critical generalized Reynolds number, which was Reg = 440, 230, 100, 30, and 25 for 0.2%, 0.4%, 0.62%, 0.85%, and 1.25%, respectively.