Agitator scale-up techniques part-1
"Welcome, curious minds!" Scaling up an agitation system from a pilot-scale reactor to a commercial production reactor is an important engineering challenge. A mixing system that performs successfully at pilot scale does not automatically guarantee the same performance at commercial scale. During scale-up, the objective is to maintain the critical mixing characteristics of the pilot process while increasing the vessel volume and equipment dimensions. Depending on the process requirements, different scale-up criteria may be selected, such as geometric similarity, constant tip speed, constant torque per unit volume, or constant power per unit volume. The appropriate scale-up criterion depends on the process objective. For example, a process that is highly sensitive to shear may require constant tip speed, while a process where overall mix...
