Determination of the Rate of Salt-Induced Rapid Coagulation of Polystyrene Latex Particles in Turbulent Flow Using Small Stirred Vessel

Abstract

In our study, we revisited a previously reported method for evaluating the mixing intensity of uniform colloidal spheres in terms of their collision frequency, with the aim of evaluating the validity of this method in the case of a small stirred vessel equipped with an impeller with four paddles. The rates of the salt-induced rapid coagulation of polystyrene latex (PSL) particles with five different diameters were measured as functions of the rotation rate. The ad-hoc assumption of the linear additivity of the perikinetics and the orthokinetics of the coagulation process was used for the analysis. Our previously proposed equation for the rate of turbulent coagulation as a function of the particle diameter, determined for an end-over-end rotation mixing device, was confirmed to be valid. However, it was found that, for small particles and low-mixing rates, i.e., for low Peclet numbers, the rate of coagulation becomes larger than that predicted on the basis of linear additivity because of the coupling effect of Brownian motion and the fluid flow during turbulent mixing. This increase occurred even though the rate was lowered by the wall effect, which resulted in an inhomogeneous distribution of the mixing intensity.