Affiliations 

  • 1 Department of Chemical and Process Engineering, Faculty of Engineering and Built Environment, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, 43600 Bangi, Selangor Darul Ehsan, Malaysia ; Malaysian Nuclear Agency, 43000 Kajang, Selangor Darul Ehsan, Malaysia
  • 2 Department of Chemical and Process Engineering, Faculty of Engineering and Built Environment, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, 43600 Bangi, Selangor Darul Ehsan, Malaysia
  • 3 Malaysian Nuclear Agency, 43000 Kajang, Selangor Darul Ehsan, Malaysia
ScientificWorldJournal, 2014;2014:242658.
PMID: 24741344 DOI: 10.1155/2014/242658

Abstract

Radiotracer experiments are carried out in order to determine the mean residence time (MRT) as well as percentage of dead zone, V dead (%), in an integrated mixer consisting of Rushton and pitched blade turbine (PBT). Conventionally, optimization was performed by varying one parameter and others were held constant (OFAT) which lead to enormous number of experiments. Thus, in this study, a 4-factor 3-level Taguchi L9 orthogonal array was introduced to obtain an accurate optimization of mixing efficiency with minimal number of experiments. This paper describes the optimal conditions of four process parameters, namely, impeller speed, impeller clearance, type of impeller, and sampling time, in obtaining MRT and V dead (%) using radiotracer experiments. The optimum conditions for the experiments were 100 rpm impeller speed, 50 mm impeller clearance, Type A mixer, and 900 s sampling time to reach optimization.

* Title and MeSH Headings from MEDLINE®/PubMed®, a database of the U.S. National Library of Medicine.