Chaotic Structures from Continuous Fluid Blending
Guy Metcalfe, Murray Rudman, Lachlan Graham
CSIRO
Australia

Keywords: mixing, structure, chaos

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The Rotated Arc Mixer (RAM) mixes viscous fluids with minimal energy either batch or in-line. The RAM has concentric outer rotating and inner stationary cylinders, the latter with several openings---otherwise no internal structure. As fluid flows through the inner cylinder, the outer cylinder rotation induces transverse flow at the openings of the inner cylinder, reorienting the flow at each opening. A “blend designer” can program the sequence of flow reorientations to produce efficient mixing or various kinds of structures (fig 1). At issue for a practical device are methods to connect processing parameters and final blend structure accounting for changes of fluid properties. We have developed computational methods towards this goal.