Abstract Summary (Max 250 words)
In many chemical and pharmaceutical processes, liquid–liquid dispersions are performed in batch stirred tanks. While stirred tanks can be suitable, energy dissipation is concentrated near the impeller, making uniform dispersion and controlled drop size slow and difficult to scale. By contrast, a properly sized in-line static mixer in a continuous pipeline can produce uniform dispersion in a single pass. Motivated by these differences, we evaluated static mixer integration in continuous flow loops at two scales to develop a mixing-energy-based scale-up approach. In prior work we studied two mixing tanks with different geometries and impellers and explored correlations of Sauter mean chord length with power and mixing energy. Those results showed that characterizing process dynamics via the mixing energy collapses data across diverse geometries and that a promising correlation exists between mixing energy and the Sauter mean chord length at the just-dispersed condition. Experiments in this new work used a 12 mm bench loop (2.5 m, 0.5 L) and a 50.8 mm industrial loop (24 m, 53 L) equipped with a commercial static mixer. Chord length distributions were monitored continuously with an FBRM probe while pressure losses across pipe sections and the static mixer were recorded. The data were used to compute component-level energy dissipation rates and Kolmogorov length scales. Tracking the evolution of chord length distribution over cycles together with component-level energy dissipation can help predict and replicate droplet distributions during pipeline scale up. Statistical analysis of these descriptors will support explicit scaling rules for industrial implementation.
