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Assessment of Mixing in Static Mixer Using Mean Age Theory
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- Author / Creator
- Patel, Kanishk
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Static mixers are in-line motionless devices placed into a pipe to promote the blending of miscible fluids or dispersion of immiscible liquids. These inserts are characterized by the mixing performance and the pressure drop they create. New designs of static mixers are continuously proposed to meet certain requirements of the final product. Instead of manufacturing prototypes of different designs and conducting costly experiments to assess the characteristics of inserts, it is suggested to use computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to visualize and quantify the performance of new insert designs. In this study, we demonstrate how CFD can be efficiently used to assess mixing via mean age theory for turbulent flow across a six-element Kenics mixer. In this study, the mixing assessment of the Kenics mixer was performed by evaluating the mean age distribution for a range of Reynolds numbers between 1 and 12 000 covering laminar, and turbulent flow regimes. Scalar plots of mean age were analyzed for each Reynolds number. Special emphasis was placed on the analysis of the turbulent flows. The frequency distribution of mean age was also evaluated at various cross-sections within the mixer for different Reynolds numbers. The surface average distribution of mean age revealed multi-modal distributions of the mean age for turbulent flows. Different visualization techniques and a machine learning model (Gaussian Mixture Model) were used to find the Gaussian curves constituting the multi-modal distribution. The visualization techniques pertaining to the field of data science were introduced into the field of CFD to allow for deeper insights.
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- Subjects / Keywords
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- Graduation date
- Fall 2021
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- Type of Item
- Thesis
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- Degree
- Master of Science
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- License
- This thesis is made available by the University of Alberta Libraries with permission of the copyright owner solely for non-commercial purposes. This thesis, or any portion thereof, may not otherwise be copied or reproduced without the written consent of the copyright owner, except to the extent permitted by Canadian copyright law.