Flow and mixing characteristics of a groove-embedded partitioned pipe mixer

Abstract

We propose a groove-embedded partitioned pipe mixer (GPPM) and conduct an in-depth numerical study on the flow and mixing characteristics of the GPPM in the creeping flow regime. The GPPM is a variant of a previously reported mixer, the barrier-embedded partitioned pipe mixer (BPPM), and is designed to achieve better energy-efficient mixing compared to the BPPM. In this paper, we first introduce the working principle of the GPPM and its mixing protocols. Then, the flow system affected by mixing protocols and geometrical parameters of the GPPM is investigated using Poincare sections. As for mixing characteristics, the flux-weighted intensity of segregation is employed for quantitative mixing analysis. It turns out that a GPPM with a proper set of design parameters can indeed lead to a globally chaotic mixing. More importantly, the best GPPM showed better mixing in terms of energy consumption compared to its counterpart, the best BPPM.