• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Sion; Orca
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.491.2829; http://www.acusim.com/papers/stirred_tank.pdf

Stirred tanks are widely used in chemical processing indu tries for blending, liquid-liquid dispersion, gas-liquid disper-sion, suspension formation, heat transfer, mass transfer and chemical reactions. Efficient mixing is crucial to the out-comes of all of these processes. For these applications, poor mixing can have serious consequences such as excessive by-product formation, inconsistent product quality in blended products, wide particle size distributions in crystallization processes, and slow mass transfer rates in bioreactors. As tighter government regulations in the pharmaceutical industry and lower margins on chemical products increase the importance of optimizing these processes for quality assurance and product enhancement, use of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) in design and optimization becomes more prevalent. CFD provides quick results for optimizing and identifying deficiencies in processes, critically impor-tant functions for product consistency in pharmaceutical industries which work with FDA testing and extremely tight regulatory standards. Product incompliance stemming from inconsistent product can be avoided if the process is either experimentally or computationally characterized. While experimentation can be costly and time consuming com-pared to characterizing a system computationally, experi-mentation is necessary to validate CFD results before they can be used for design and optimization processes. This review examines three cases of CFD validation for the ORCA CFD package These cases, variations of processes that are used in the pharmaceutical and chemical process industries, are based on a batch reactor with various types of