Abstract
Mechanical mixing with an impeller in continuous laminar flow is sometimes introduced to industrial processes. In glass producing industries, especially, mechanical mixing has a significant role in homogenising continuously flowing molten glass at high temperature and achieving high quality glass. Nevertheless, the mixing performance evaluation in a continuous flow system, especially incomplete mixed flow, has not been well studied. It is necessary to enable quantitative evaluation of mixing to enhance the development of new mixing technology in this field. In the present study, concentration distribution measurements of an injected tracer in continuous laminar flow were performed in the downstream area of an impeller to investigate the influences of the impeller speed and setting position. An evaluation method with the standard deviation calculated from the measured concentration of 15 electrodes in a channel showed good agreement with the visualization method and the effect of impeller speed and position on mixing could be quantitatively evaluated.
