Chaotic mixing performance enhanced by rigid-flexible impeller with long-short blades in stirred tank

The presence of a mixing isolation regions in a stirred reactor is a major obstacle to enhancing fluid mixing. Breaking the symmetrical flow field structure in the stirred tank and destroying the mixing isolation area can improve the fluid mixing efficiency. The Matlab software was used to calculate the maximum Lyapunov exponent (LLE) and multi-scale entropy (MSE). The effects of different blade types, flexible blade length, flexible blade number, blade height from bottom and rotation speed on fluid mixing were compared. The results show that the rigid-flexible impeller with long-short blades (RF-LSB) can enhance the flow field structure more unstable and asymmetric with deformation and random vibration of flexible pieces, destroy the symmetry flow in the process of fluid mixing, induce the asymmetric flow field, and make more fluid into the chaotic state. When at 90 r/min and three pieces of flexible, the LLE of the RF-LSB is larger than that of rigid impeller and rigid-flexible impeller RF-LSB with increase of 20.22% and 7.98% respectively. The mixing time (θ_m) of the three systems RF-LSB (three pieces), rigid impeller, rigid-flexible impeller] has an exponential relationship with the power consumption per unit volume (P_v). When P_v is constant, θ_m of the RF-LSB system is the smallest. Results showed that the RF-LSB (three pieces) is superior to rigid impeller and rigid-flexible impeller, which is more conducive to fluid chaotic mixing.