Hydrodynamic Characterization of Heterogeneities in Aerated Stirred Tank Reactors. From an Eulerian to a Lagrangian Perspective

Aerated stirred tank reactors are commonly used for chemical, biological and pharmaceutical processes with the highest requirements for constant and efficient mass transport and mixing performance. These reactors are known for their simple design and a very extensive description of their operating behavior in the relevant literature. The purpose of this work is to identify heterogeneities and coherent structures in aerated stirred tank reactors and to describe what the influences of these structures have on the mass transport and mixing processes. For this purpose, both the global and local mixing time distributions and, for the first time, the dispersion coefficients are determined with high local resolution.