Fluid Mechanics and Transport Phenomena

Nonisothermal modeling of heat transfer inside an internal batch mixer

  1. Yun Bai1,
  2. Uttandaraman Sundararaj1,*,
  3. Krishnaswamy Nandakumar2

Article first published online: 29 DEC 2010

DOI: 10.1002/aic.12484

Issue

AIChE Journal

AIChE Journal

Volume 57, Issue 10, pages 2657–2669, October 2011

Additional Information

How to Cite

Bai, Y., Sundararaj, U. and Nandakumar, K. (2011), Nonisothermal modeling of heat transfer inside an internal batch mixer. AIChE J., 57: 2657–2669. doi: 10.1002/aic.12484

Author Information

  1. 1

    Dept. of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering, University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, T2N 1N4, Canada

  2. 2

    Cain Dept. of Chemical Engineering, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 70803

*Dept. of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering, University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, T2N 1N4, Canada

Publication History

  1. Issue published online: 9 SEP 2011
  2. Article first published online: 29 DEC 2010
  3. Accepted manuscript online: 3 NOV 2010 08:00AM EST
  4. Manuscript Revised: 15 OCT 2010
  5. Manuscript Received: 29 JUL 2010

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Keywords:

  • batch mixer;
  • nonisothermal;
  • simulation;
  • heat transfer;
  • mixing;
  • polymer processing

Abstract

A nonisothermal transient process of temperature increase due to viscous heating was simulated for a 69 cm3 internal batch mixer (BM) using a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software, Polyflow 3.9 form ANSYS, Inc., to obtain the temporal temperature distribution and characterize the heat transfer between polymer melt and mixer wall. The melt temperature obtained from simulation was verified with experiments. Starting from a uniform temperature of 463 K, when a rotation speed of 5.24 rad/s is imposed, viscous heating caused a maximum temperature rise of 3 K for a polyethylene (PE) resin, and 6 K for a polystyrene (PS) resin. The transient flow fields inside the batch mixer were characterized with velocity profiles and a mixing index parameter, which show that laminar flow dominates inside the mixer while a small percentage of elongational flow, converging flow, and recirculation flow is also present. © 2010 American Institute of Chemical Engineers AIChE J, 2011

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