Effect of element thickness on the pressure drop in the Kenics static mixer

Abstract

The prediction of pressure drop is critical to continuous manufacturing of pharmaceuticals and fine chemicals. Although many correlations have been developed to predict the pressure drop in static mixers, the effect of element thickness on the pressure drop has been surprisingly ignored. With the wide application of the milli-scale static mixer in continuous manufacturing, the element thickness of the static mixer appears to be a particularly prominent factor in the pressure drop. In this study, we define the free cross-sectional area ratio to consider how the element thickness affects the pressure drop in the Kenics static mixer. The partial least squares regression (PLSR) method combined with Latin hypercube sampling (LHS) is proposed to construct a new pressure drop correlation, which builds a relationship between the Reynolds number (Re), the aspect ratio (AR), the element thickness and the friction factor. The reliability of the proposed correlation was validated by the experimental results and showed a good prediction accuracy.