Implementation of Normal and Fractal Baffles for Palm Oil and Methanol Mixing in Stirred Tank

Abstract

Mixing is a vital process in a biodiesel reactor. It is known that turbulent flow is recommended for mixing process since it could mix the mixture thoroughly in an effective manner. Previous studies have proven that flow pattern, Reynolds’s number are influenced by the impeller design especially blade number, blade type, and blade size. This study of comparison and stimulates the flow characteristics between normal baffled and fractal baffled stirred in mixing biodiesel reactor by using ANSYS Fluent software. The geometry of the model was modelled in Solidworks then imported to ANSYS Fluent software. The CFD simulation then was run with medium mesh and the k-epsilon turbulence model. The simulation run by Rushton impeller with a rotational speed of 150 rpm and number time steps are 1000, 1200, 1400 and 3600 seconds with 20 iterations. The satisfactory result of comparisons shows that different baffled to influence and strongly affects the flow characteristics at a different type of baffle. Based on the simulation result, the fractal baffles give better performance in mixing process compare to the normal baffle for this application.