Study of kneading pressure and power consumption in a twin-blade planetary mixer for mixing highly viscous fluids

This paper is aimed to study the relationship between the kneading pressure, power consumption and the planetary motion parameters of a twin-blade planetary mixer for mixing highly viscous fluids by using CFD simulations. An experimental setup is built to measure the kneading pressure with a thin-film pressure sensor. A validated CFD model is used to investigated the kneading mechanism and hydro-dynamic behaviors in the mixer. Results indicate that increasing the absolute speed and the speed ratio can significantly increase the maximum kneading pressure, while decreasing the absolute speed or increasing the speed ratio can effectively reduce the power consumption. The correlation of the kneading pressure with planetary motion parameters is obtained by proposing a specific pressure-oriented Reynolds number ReM-p and a pressure number N-pmax and the correlation of the power consumption with planetary motion parameters is determined by introducing the improved Reynolds number Re-i and power number N-pi. (C) 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Automated summary

This paper investigates the relationship between kneading pressure, power consumption, and planetary motion parameters of a twin-blade planetary mixer for mixing highly viscous fluids using CFD simulations. Results show that increasing speed and speed ratio can increase kneading pressure, while decreasing speed or increasing speed ratio can reduce power consumption.