Title: Experimental investigation and CFD simulation of power consumption for mixing in Gyro Shaker

Authors: P.A. Abdul Samad; P.R. Shalij

Addresses: Department of Mechanical Engineering, Government Engineering College, Thrissur-9, Kerala, India ' Department of Production Engineering, Government Engineering College, Thrissur-9, Kerala, India

Abstract: The better mixing of ingredients is the key to improving the quality of the process in the manufacturing of several products. Gyro Shaker is a dual rotation mixer commonly used for mixing highly viscous fluids. In this work, CFD simulation for the multiphase mixing of Gyro Shaker is carried out for obtaining numerical solutions. Simulations of three different mixing models namely Eulerian granular model, mixture model and volume of fluid (VOF) model are compared with each other. Reynolds number and power number based on characteristic velocity were derived for the Gyro Shaker. Experiments were conducted to validate the mixing power by the simulation using torque method and viscous dissipation method. The viscous dissipation method for mixing power demonstrates a low deviation from the experiment data than torque method. Among the three simulation models, the multiphase mixture model shows the minimum variation of the experimental data. A comparison of the flow field of the different mixing models is also carried out.

Keywords: computational fluid dynamics; CFD; characteristic velocity; Eulerian granular; Gyro Shaker; mixture model; multiphase; power consumption; power number; viscous dissipation; volume of fluid; VOF.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCSE.2020.105723

International Journal of Computational Science and Engineering, 2020 Vol.21 No.2, pp.188 - 201

Received: 21 Feb 2017
Accepted: 10 Mar 2018
Published online: 11 Mar 2020 *

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