Nonisothermal modeling of heat transfer inside an internal batch mixer |
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| Authors: | Yun Bai Uttandaraman Sundararaj Krishnaswamy Nandakumar |
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| Affiliation: | 1. Dept. of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering, University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, T2N 1N4, Canada;2. Cain Dept. of Chemical Engineering, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 70803 |
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| Abstract: | A nonisothermal transient process of temperature increase due to viscous heating was simulated for a 69 cm3 internal batch mixer (BM) using a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software, Polyflow 3.9 form ANSYS, Inc., to obtain the temporal temperature distribution and characterize the heat transfer between polymer melt and mixer wall. The melt temperature obtained from simulation was verified with experiments. Starting from a uniform temperature of 463 K, when a rotation speed of 5.24 rad/s is imposed, viscous heating caused a maximum temperature rise of 3 K for a polyethylene (PE) resin, and 6 K for a polystyrene (PS) resin. The transient flow fields inside the batch mixer were characterized with velocity profiles and a mixing index parameter, which show that laminar flow dominates inside the mixer while a small percentage of elongational flow, converging flow, and recirculation flow is also present. © 2010 American Institute of Chemical Engineers AIChE J, 2011 |
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| Keywords: | batch mixer nonisothermal simulation heat transfer mixing polymer processing |
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