AbstractMixing behaviour of submersed reactors. New improved measuring techniques lead to new insights into the local mixing behaviour of submerse reactors. As exemplified by airlift tower loop reactors, it is shown that it is possible to obtain more information from gas residence time distributions if the signal‐to‐noise ratio of the measurement can be improved significantly. Additional information is obtained, e.g., on that part of the gas recirculated around the loop or the circulation time of the gas phase. The recirculated gas significantly influences the gas backmixing in such reactors. A more thorough investigation of the gas phase motion requires locally resolved data. For the properties of the gas phase, local measuring techniques are available, which allow for measurements of the mean bubble velocity profile even during production runs in large aerated stirred tank reactors. The results show that the gas backmixing is acutely dependent on the viscosity of the continuous liquid phase. Complementary measurements on the properties of the continuous liquid phase can be investigated by means of the heat‐pulse‐technique. This also is applicable in real media, e.g., during biotechnological cultivation runs. Besides the measurement of the mean liquid velocity, one can, furthermore, obtain some information on the locally dominating mixing mechanism. One significant result of such investigations is that in the airlift reactors investigated the bubble‐wake mixing mechanism dominates, whereas the isotropic turbulence in terms of the statistical turbulence theory plays a secondary role. This even holds at very high energy inputs.