Abstract Agitation of highly viscous shear thinning fluids is normally conducted with complex impeller designs. Often, impellers almost as large as the tanks containing them and impeller blades equipped with holes are adopted in industry. In this work, we studied experimentally the main features of the flow generated by this type of impellers for a mixture of glycerol with a carbomeric gel by means of particle image velocimetry. The experiments were conducted at temperatures ranging from 40 to 60 °C and impeller speeds ranging from 40 to 140 rpm. In all cases, the flow regime was laminar or in the transition region. We also used computational fluid dynamics simulations to describe the behaviour of the mixer, validating the results experimentally with good agreement. We used the numerical results to obtain information on the performance of the mixer, determining the locations and size of vigorous agitation zones and the local effect of the holes present on the impeller blades. The power curves of the mixer were obtained, and the mixer efficiency in terms of power consumption was found to be similar to other impellers used to mix highly viscous non-Newtonian fluids.

中文翻译：

---

用于高粘性剪切稀化流体的混合器的计算流体动力学研究和 PIV 验证

摘要 高粘性剪切稀化流体的搅拌通常采用复杂的叶轮设计。通常，工业上采用几乎与容纳它们的罐一样大的叶轮和带有孔的叶轮叶片。在这项工作中，我们通过粒子图像测速法实验研究了由这种类型的叶轮产生的甘油与卡波姆凝胶混合物的流动的主要特征。实验在 40 至 60 °C 的温度范围和 40 至 140 rpm 的叶轮速度范围内进行。在所有情况下，流态都是层流或在过渡区。我们还使用计算流体动力学模拟来描述混合器的行为，以良好的一致性通过实验验证结果。我们使用数值结果来获得有关混合器性能的信息，确定剧烈搅拌区的位置和大小以及叶轮叶片上存在的孔的局部影响。获得了混合器的功率曲线，并且发现在功率消耗方面的混合器效率与用于混合高粘性非牛顿流体的其他叶轮相似。