Mixing tank simulation with Ansys fluent(2D and 3D)

Why the mixing process is so important?

The mixing process is incredibly important due to its widespread application across various industrial sectors, including the food industry. In many industrial settings, there arises a need to blend large quantities of fluids, necessitating the use of sizable mixers. Thus, optimizing the mixing process for efficiency becomes paramount. To achieve this, it is crucial to learn how to simulate and optimize mixing processes to attain high efficiency.

An Overview of this tutorial

We will learn how to design a mixer blade and the fluid geometry. We can do it in Ansys Design Modeler or do it in Solidworks and then import the geometry from Solidworks to Ansys Workbench. We will learn how to do it in Ansys Design Modeler. Then we learn how to implement the meshing process in Ansys Meshing and after that, we will check the mesh quality parameters such as orthogonal quality and skewness which are the important and effective parameters that affect our study. We implement different sizes of meshing and we see which one is the appropriate mesh size. The important part is how to simulate the process. It contains choosing appropriate boundary conditions, multi-phase model, and turbulence model. This type of simulation is transient because the mixing quality is a function of time. We start with defining general settings such as the appropriate turbulence model, multi-phase model, existence of gravity effects, and transient solver. After that, we choose different materials. Also, we must define sliding mesh motion for blade walls and choose the angular speed and rotation axis. Then, we select boundary conditions and choose the best solving methods and appropriate schemes for the discretization of time, continuity equation, and turbulent quantities and also a volume fraction calculator.

Next, we start to solve the coupled equations using Fluent software. Before we start to run the calculation we must initialize the solution and after that, we do the patching process. We extract the animation file of the solution from first time step to the end of the mixing process.

So we open the CFD-Post to post-processing the results. In CDF-Post we talk about results in some time steps. In CFD-Post we make Time-step animation of the mixing process.

Workshop 1:

At the first workshop, we will learn how to simulate the mixing process in 2D with details. We start with designing the geometry and the meshing process. After that, we choose two different liquids to be mixed. We will assess the mixing process from first time step to the end.

Workshop 2:

At the second workshop, we will simulate the same process as what we did at the first workshop but in 3D. We use two different types of gases for this 3D simulation. We also use mixers with more blades than the first workshop for the mixing process. After that, we can argue about the results and compare the results with the first workshop.