Numerical simulation of laminar flow field in a stirred tank

Stirred tanks are used extensively in process industry and one of the most commonly used impellers in stirred tanks is the Rushton disk turbine. Surprisingly few data are available regarding flow and mixing in stirred-tank reactors with Rushton turbine in the laminar regime, in particular the laminar flow in baffled tanks. In this paper, the laminar flow field in a baffled tank stirred by a standard Rushton turbine is simulated with the improved inner-outer iterative method. The non-inertial coordinate system is used for the impeller region, which is in turn used as the boundary conditions for iteration. It is found that the simulation results are in good agreement with previous experiments. In addition, the flow number and impeller power number calculated from the simulated flow field are in satisfactory agreement with experimental data. This numerical method allows prediction of flow structure requiring no experimental data as the boundary conditions and has the potential of being used to scale-up and design of related process equipment.