The behavior of stirred vessels with anchor type impellers

Anchor impellers are used specially for highly viscous flow, with the viscosity ranging from 10 to 100 Pa.s, which is typical of polymer reactions and some processes in food industries. The reactions are normally carried out under laminar flow. Anchor impellers are also suited for pseudoplastic and thixotropic fluids. Despite its importance in chemical industries, there are few works, which study anchor type impellers. The computational works for these impellers in the literature are very scarce and normally show a coarse grid and rough approximations to the shape of the vessel. This work presents a detailed model of a stirred vessel using anchor impellers. It calculates for the three components of the velocity on a two dimensional grid. The simulations refer to the secondary flow, which is of particular interest because, under laminar flow, it controls heat transfer. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.