Investigation of propeller mixer for agitation of non-Newtonian fluid flow to predict the characteristics within the design process

Many different procedures to design mixers have been investigated in research literature. The methods are either typically based on empiricism or already available mixers are scaled to adjust them to different but similar operating conditions, as considered in the original design process. For the most part the power characteristics of such a design of mixer has been proven through empirical methods, or is estimated within the mentioned scale-up methodology. The estimation of the power consumption has been shown as especially prone to error. The practice of estimation is associated with uncertainties, due to the determination of the power consumption in a late step of the design technique, or just simply has a low reliability. In this paper, a method will be derived in order to predict the full power characteristic without performing any experimental investigations within the design process. A new blade element momentum theory based design method will be taken and enhanced to calculate the power consumption by actually inverting the entire design procedure. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.