Study of kneading pressure and power consumption in a twin-blade planetary mixer for mixing highly viscous fluids

Abstract

This paper is aimed to study the relationship between the kneading pressure, power consumption and the planetary motion parameters of a twin-blade planetary mixer for mixing highly viscous fluids by using CFD simulations. An experimental setup is built to measure the kneading pressure with a thin-film pressure sensor. A validated CFD model is used to investigated the kneading mechanism and hydrodynamic behaviors in the mixer. Results indicate that increasing the absolute speed and the speed ratio can significantly increase the maximum kneading pressure, while decreasing the absolute speed or increasing the speed ratio can effectively reduce the power consumption. The correlation of the kneading pressure with planetary motion parameters is obtained by proposing a specific pressure-oriented Reynolds number ReM-p and a pressure number Npmax and the correlation of the power consumption with planetary motion parameters is determined by introducing the improved Reynolds number Rei and power number Npi.