New insights into flows in stirred vessels with advanced laser diagnostics

Mixing in stirred vessels is a key unit operation in many engineering operations, and is of particular interest to Syngenta, but also across numerous industries, and has motivated many studies aimed at understanding a range of phenomena as a pathway for optimising relevant processes [1-3]. Understanding the key transport phenomena in these processes relies on appropriately scaled-down mixing experiments, and excellence in scale down, in turn, requires properly sized vessels and selected fluids and operating conditions.

Measurements of such phenomena can be performed using different approaches. Corporate laboratories focus on measurement robustness, speed, reliability, cost and safety, while university best-practice is concerned with novel methods that can inspect such flows at a level of detail that is currently unattainable in industry, thus providing new information and a much-improved level of understanding. The overall aim of this present project is to apply advanced measurement techniques to a selected flow of interest, and to use the resulting data to interpret and comment on current industrial knowledge and practice. Of interest, as noted earlier, are flows in stirred vessels in the present of interfaces (bubbles or droplets) and heat/mass transfer