Numerical Study of the Heat Transfer Rate in a Helical Static Mixer

Abstract

In chemical processing industries, heating, cooling, and other thermal processing of viscous fluids are an integral part of the unit operations. Static mixers are often used in continuous mixing, heat transfer, and chemical reactions applications. In spite of widespread usage, the flow physics of static mixers is not fully understood. For a given application, besides experimentation, the modern approach to resolve this is to use powerful computational fluid dynamics tools to study static mixer performance. This paper extends a previous study by the authors on an industrial helical static mixer and investigates heat transfer and mixing mechanisms within a helical static mixer. A three-dimensional finite volume simulation is used to study the performance of the mixer under both laminar and turbulent flow conditions. The turbulent flow cases were solved using k−ω model. The effects of different flow conditions on the performance of the mixer are studied. Also, the effects of different thermal boundary conditions on the heat transfer rate in static mixer are studied. Heat transfer rates for a flow in a pipe containing no mixer are compared to that with a helical static mixer.