Mixing Analysis of Laminar Flow in Static Mixers with Circle Grid Fractal Perforated Plate Elements

The static mixers are widely used in many industries to obtain the desired type of mixing. In the context of mixing process, two different fluids and have a different properties will mix in a single equipment to produce an another fluid with a new property. In this research, a new approach of static mixers was proposed for pipeline mixing. The flow pattern, pressure drop and mixing characteristics (coefficient of variation) were carried out by means of computer simulations. The static mixers introduced here consists of a series of perforated plate with circle grids fractal pattern elements. The simulations work were carried out by using a commercial package of Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD), ANSYS CFX 14.0 software. Three levels of laminar flow with Reynolds numbers (Re) of 100, 200 and 400 respectively had been used to investigate the performance of the static mixers introduced here. The effectiveness of circle grid perforated plate static mixer had been evaluated by comparing the homogeneity level of mixing fluids for each flow simulated. The simulations gave a new insights in the flow pattern in circle grids fractal perforated plate elements. The pressure drop predictions compare favorably with literature data and the coefficient of variation (COV) value for circle grid perforated plate with 50% porosity at Reynolds number 100 was 0.0744 which is out of the range meanwhile at Reynolds number 200 and 400 was 0.0483 and 0.0247 respectively which are in the range of reasonable target for many applications. Mixing in the elements occurs through a combination of flow splitting and shearing at the junctions of successive elements. Besides that, simple installation and manufacturing of this type of static mixers makes the fractal perforated plate’s element an excellent static mixing device.